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As Greenpoint’s Jewish community grows, so does this shul’s Hebrew school
(New York Jewish Week) — Greenpoint, Brooklyn is known for many things: its extensive waterfront, a tight-knit Polish community and a vibrant arts scene.
One thing it’s not known for: a thriving Jewish community. But that’s rapidly changing.
The Greenpoint Shul — North Brooklyn’s only non-Haredi, brick-and-mortar synagogue — is today home to some 100 member families. That’s twice as many members as just 16 months ago, according to Rabbi Isaiah Rothstein, who has led the community since August 2024.
The congregation is looking to future generations, too: This school year, the Orthodox congregation officially added a Hebrew school serving some 30 children in grades kindergarten through 8. The school provides Jewish families an alternative to the only other option in the area, the Hebrew school that’s run by Chabad of North Brooklyn in nearby Williamsburg.
“I know the power and importance of having a youth department and it being a core pillar of building a thriving and growing community,” said Rothstein, who was previously the youth director at Young Israel of Stamford, Connecticut before assuming the helm of the Greenpoint Shul.
The Hebrew school was initially founded in 2019 by Yoni Kretzmer and his wife, artist Avital Burg, who are members of the synagogue and the parents of three children ages 8, 4 and 2. For five years, the school operated independently but borrowed the space inside the synagogue. As of this academic year, the school was officially “adopted” by the shul, which did not have a Hebrew school of its own.
“We saw that there’s nothing happening in North Brooklyn,” Yoni Kretzmer, who moved to Greenpoint from Israel with his wife in 2015, said of the local Jewish education scene. “So that was basically it — we started because we thought it was possible.”
Six years later, Kretzmer is now employed by the Greenpoint Shul, where one benefit he has seen so far is getting to exchange ideas with the rabbinic leadership team. He no longer has to independently collect tuition from parents, and he can provide students with supplies and snacks directly purchased from the synagogue budget.
“The way that we can present it now is as part of a much larger structure,” Kretzmer said. “When people [are] joining, they’re not only feeling that we’re using the shul, but that they’re part of a community center in the fullest meaning of the word.”
He added, “Now I can really be a teacher and the organizer, but I don’t have to be the accountant.”
With a focus on Torah and art, the school opened with about a dozen students — split into two groups, with Kretzmer teaching the older students, and Burg teaching the younger students — and grew via word of mouth. “It was mainly parents who brought other parents,” Kretzmer said. “So the connections were kind of within the neighborhood, of people who knew each other.”
The new school bucks multiple trends. Across the country, supplementary Jewish school enrollment is down by nearly half over the last two decades, a recent study found, and many of those that remain have reduced the number of days they operate. The Greenpoint Shul’s school holds classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, though different children attend each day.
While enrollment declined early in the pandemic, “once it was deemed safe to return, then it really started growing,” said Kretzmer, who is now the youth director at Greenpoint Shul.
One recent arrival is Andrew Altfest, who moved to nearby Williamsburg in 2014 and enrolled his 5-year-old son, Alden, last year.
“We really like the values that are being taught,” said Altfest, a financial advisor who grew up Reform. “Those values, they range from everything: learning Torah stories, Jewish culture, ethics. And we value the diversity of the families of the kids that are there.”
Like so many parts of Brooklyn, Greenpoint has seen a wave of gentrification and development in recent decades. In Greenpoint, this change was spurred, in part, by a massive rezoning along the neighborhood’s once-derelict waterfront in 2005. While there is no reliable data on the neighborhood’s Jewish population — studies often lump Greenpoint with Williamsburg, which is home to a sizable Hasidic community — locals believe the number of Jews in Greenpoint has grown in recent years.
“Greenpoint is not a famously Jewish neighborhood in New York City,” said Greenpoint Shul president Daphne Lasky. “I think there are other things other than Jewish community that sometimes draw people to Greenpoint: the waterfront location, the scale of the buildings. There’s so much creative energy in the neighborhood. But then you end up with Jewish families who have those interests and they also want to come together around their Jewish life as well.”
As such, other Jewish institutions have grown to meet the needs of the area’s Jewish community. The Neighborhood: An Urban Center for Jewish Life, a Jewish cultural and events hub funded by UJA-Federartion of New York, was founded in 2022 expressly to serve Jews in both central and northern Brooklyn.
“We feel there’s a really significant demand,” said Neighborhood director Rebecca Guber. “Part of it, which is kind of hard to wrap your head around, is that in North Brooklyn, the only Jewish infrastructure is Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox, and that’s just not serving all members of the community.”
For now, at least, The Neighborhood does not have a physical space.
The Greenpoint Shul, meanwhile, has a long history in the neighborhood. Founded at the turn of the last century by German-Jewish immigrants as Congregation Ahavas Israel, the synagogue is in a landmarked Romanesque Revival building at 108 Noble Street whose cornerstone was laid in 1903. Today’s Greenpoint Shul is the result of multiple mergers between two neighboring Reform congregations and one Orthodox synagogue. Its prayer service is Orthodox; women sit upstairs in the balcony while men sit downstairs for prayer services. But the community is multicultural, multiracial and welcoming of all backgrounds, including many members who have recently converted to Judaism. While Orthodox families are likely to send their children to day schools and yeshivas, the Hebrew school is geared toward “children of all ages and backgrounds,” according to its web site.
“The congregation has gone through a lot of changes and growth — and shrinking and growing again — over the last 140 years,” Lasky said. “In particular, in the last 25 years or so, as Greenpoint has had its own renaissance as a neighborhood, there’s been more and more families moving into the neighborhood that need Jewish education for their children and Jewish connection for their children.”
Because of the new, formal relationship between the school and the shul, Rothstein said he’s already seen interest from prospective parents who would like to enroll their kids in the program next year. But the growth of a community isn’t just measured in sheer numbers — Rothstein added that, as a result of the Hebrew school, youth attendance at recent Sukkot and holiday events increased this year.
“We’ve seen, already, crossover, where it’s a pipeline to deeper engagement,” Rothstein said.
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Jewish Democrats back Michigan AG Dana Nessel’s decision to skip state party convention
(JTA) — Local and national Jewish Democrats say they are sympathetic after Michigan’s Jewish attorney general, Dana Nessel, said she would skip the state Democratic Party’s nominating convention over concerns about antisemitism and harassment.
“I don’t blame AG Nessel for not wanting to go and basically put herself in situations that feel untenable in this moment of time and don’t add any value politically, personally,” Jessica “Decky” Alexander, the Michigan Jewish Democratic caucus chair, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday.
Alexander’s comment came a day after Nessel announced during a televised antisemitism roundtable that she would be skipping the convention next month, where party leaders will finalize the state’s Democratic candidate for Senate following a divisive primary that has focused in part on Israel and antisemitism.
“I don’t feel safe going. I feel like my presence isn’t going to be welcome. I don’t want to get chased around. I don’t want to get harassed. I don’t want to get yelled and screamed at. I don’t want to get booed off the stage, irrespective of what I’m saying,” Nessel said during the roundtable. “And I believe that if I go, that is what will happen because it’s been happening to me.”
She said she had filed a formal complaint within the party about a party official who had called her a neo-Nazi because of her beliefs. “Why is this person more accepted in our party than me?” she asked without naming the official. Her office responded to a request for comment by referring to the recorded livestream of the antisemitism roundtable.
Nessel’s declaration comes in the final days of the primary between Rep. Haley Stevens, a pro-Israel stalwart, and Abdul El-Sayed, a democratic socialist who is deeply critical of Israel. El-Sayed is surging in polls despite a reported $30 million spent against him by AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, and its supporters, whom he has made a target of criticism from the campaign trail.
Nessel’s comments also follow turmoil at the Michigan Democratic Party’s endorsement convention in April, where Stevens was booed by attendees. A third primary candidate who later dropped out of the race, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, said a convention attendee had targeted her Jewish husband with an antisemitic slur.
The incident has fueled alarm among Jewish Democrats, according to Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America.
“She’s not alone,” Soifer told JTA about Nessel on Friday. “We’ve heard from other Jewish Democrats who attended the Democratic Party convention earlier this year in Michigan, and there was a sense of discomfort amid what felt like a pro-Palestinian protest [that] may have even blurred the line for some into antisemitic sentiment — and it’s really concerning.”
Nessel has raised the alarm about antisemitism within the party for years, alleging in 2024 that Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a prominent pro-Palestinian voice, had been antisemitic when criticizing charges Nessel filed against pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of Michigan.
For her part, Alexander said she would be participating in the nominating convention and said she believed the chair of the state Democratic Party, Curtis Hertel, had been “very accessible and very open to making sure that we, including our Jewish elected officials, feel safe in that space.” But she said she understood why Nessel was staying away.
“It would never even occur to me, but I’m not an elected official,” Alexander said. “It’s a different stake for me than it is for Dana. I understand her completely.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Jewish Democrats back Michigan AG Dana Nessel’s decision to skip state party convention appeared first on The Forward.
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Maine rabbis call for peace, urge politicians to stop calling Gaza war a ‘genocide’
(JTA) — Every congregational rabbi in Maine has signed onto a statement calling for peace and urging the state’s political leaders to stop using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s war in Gaza, following a Democratic primary in which several candidates used the label for the first time.
But the rabbis also indicated that they, too, were unsatisfied with conditions in the Middle East and called on Israeli and Palestinian leaders to work toward a peaceful future.
“We call upon Maine’s leaders, and particularly its political leaders, to reject the irresponsible usage of the term in describing the Israel-Hamas War,” said the statement released on Friday. “We also call upon Israeli and Palestinian leaders to end the cycle of violence and to create a better world for both Palestinian and Israeli children.”
The statement, titled “A Call for Peace and Responsible Rhetoric,” argues that using the term as a “political slogan does not advance peace in the Middle East.” The term “erases essential moral and legal distinctions, diminishes the meaning of genocide, and inflames hatred for the local Jewish community,” the rabbis say.
“Compassion for Palestinians does not require the adoption of hateful and misleading language,” they continue. “Advocating for peace does not require participation in a ‘Holocaust inversion’ against the Jewish community. And political leadership does not require demonizing one community in the service of another.”
The statement comes days after Troy Jackson, a former logger and state Senate president, secured the Maine Democratic U.S. Senate nomination Saturday at the party’s nominating convention to replace Graham Platner, a staunch Israel critic who dropped out of the race earlier this month. Platner faced a sexual assault allegation, which he denies. Jackson now faces Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins in November’s general election.
Platner’s romp to the primary victory featured routine use of “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions. And ahead of the convention to replace him, Jackson and several other Democratic hopefuls who later exited the race began using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s war in Gaza for the first time, a shift that drew scrutiny from some Jewish leaders and voters in the state.
The use of the term has become a “currency for acquiring power and position in Maine’s Democratic party,” Rabbi Rachel Isaacs, the leader of Beth Israel Congregation in Waterville, who also signed the statement, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“Too many Maine Democrats are cynically willing to trade in that currency at the expense of our safety and dignity,” she said in an emailed statement. “We decided we needed to say something collectively, both about the specious and dangerous nature of the claim, and about how much damage has been done to our families and congregants.”
The statement Friday was spearheaded by the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine and signed by every congregational rabbi in the state, including Rabbi Bill Siemers of the Conservative Congregation Beth Israel in Bangor and Rabbi Erica Asch of the Reform Temple Beth El in Augusta. (Rabbis affiliated with the Chabad movement in Maine did not appear on the signatory list.)
Zach Schwartz, the director of the Jewish Community Relations Council at the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine, said the federation hoped the “unity displayed here in Maine can inspire Jewish communities across the US to also unite against the extremist rhetoric harming our community and our children.”
Rabbi Josh Stanton, the associate vice president of interfaith and intergroup initiatives for Jewish Federations of North America, also hailed the joint statement.
“Maine’s Jewish clergy are setting an important example with their call to put aside inflammatory rhetoric and look to the common good,” Stanton said in an emailed statement. “At a time of rising polarization and declining civil discourse, the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine’s efforts to unify the community around this important message are a mark of true leadership.”
Isaacs told JTA that she hoped Jackson would “support, understand, and advocate for all of Maine’s citizens, including the totality of Maine’s diverse Jewish community.”
“Work with us to figure out how to express outrage and legitimate critique of Israel’s government without succumbing to language that you might not know is an ancient antisemitic trope, or dismissing the security needs of Israel’s citizens,” Isaacs said of her message to Jackson. “Please have the courage to forge your own path, and not follow in the footsteps of Graham Platner, a man who should have never been normalized, endorsed, or empowered.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Maine rabbis call for peace, urge politicians to stop calling Gaza war a ‘genocide’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Boy George cedes role of King Herod in ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ production after releasing pro-Israel song
(JTA) — Boy George has withdrawn from his run as King Herod in London’s West End revival of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” days before he was due to take the stage and 24 hours after releasing “We Will Dance Again,” dedicated to the victims of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on the Nova music festival in Israel.
The 80’s pop star was scheduled to appear at London’s Palladium starting Monday as part of the production’s rotating cast playing King Herod, the Judean king who is best known by Jews for his expansion of the Second Temple and to Christians for his efforts to stave off the arrival of a challenger — the story of which is reflected in the rock opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.
Boy George will be replaced by actor Richard Armitage in the London production.
In announcing the cast change, Paul Kelmsley, the singer’s manager, did not directly mention the blowback the former Culture Club frontman was receiving for releasing a pro-Israel song but alluded to it.
“George has never been afraid to stand by his personal convictions, and I have always respected him for that,” he said. ”In this instance, I felt it was right to step aside, allowing the production to remain the focus, while ensuring everyone involved can move forward with mutual respect and goodwill.”
Boy George is defending his decision to release the song, saying he believes artists should be free to express their views even when they are unpopular. In “We Will Dance Again,” the singer rejects claims of genocide against Israel and proclaims, “If you’re ever confused, I stand with the Jews.”
Earlier Friday, Boy George lashed back at the vitriol he was getting online. “What is most shocking is the amount of gay folk attacking me, ” he posted on X. “If you support terrorism you can in the words of Divine ‘Take your toolkit and go f—_ a garage,’” he said, referring to a quote attributed to the taboo-breaking transgender artist.
“When I say ‘they want to kill every last one of us’ I am also talking about us queers, not just the Jewish community,” Boy George said. “When will you wake up?”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Boy George cedes role of King Herod in ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ production after releasing pro-Israel song appeared first on The Forward.
