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As Israel urged caution, these Syrian Jews lobbied the U.S. to lift sanctions on Syria
(JTA) — “Mouaz, what do you think, should I go?”
The day after Henry Hamra learned that Islamist rebels had ousted Bashar Assad from power — ending more than six decades of Ba’athist rule over Syria — he was on the phone with his friend Mouaz Moustafa, the executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force.
The unlikely alliance — a Syrian-American son of Palestinian refugees and a Syrian Jewish cantor whose father was Syria’s chief rabbi — would drive a yearlong campaign to lift punishing sanctions that Moustafa had helped bring about.
It would also place prominent Syrian American Jews opposite Israel’s government, which remains intensely wary of the new regime in Syria.
Hamra fled Syria with his family in 1992, after the Ba’athist government lifted the ban on Jews traveling abroad. Ba’athist restrictions on one of the largest and oldest Jewish communities in the Middle East forced the displacement of more than 30,000 Jews.
Hamra, speaking in a thick Brooklyn accent, recounted how he had watched his country fall apart. There was little he or his family could do from their exile. Henry’s father, Yosef Hamra, was a rabbi and leader of the Damascus Jewish community, and his uncle, Rabbi Avraham Hamra, who settled in Holon, Israel, after leaving Syria, served as the country’s last chief rabbi until 1994.
Moustafa, the son of a Palestinian refugee father and a Syrian mother, had wasted little time before heading back to Syria. By the time Hamra called, he was already there. Moustafa’s reply was immediate, he recalled: “Absolutely, I was just there, and I’m going back. You need to come with me.”
Moustafa founded the Syrian Emergency Task Force in March 2011 in response to the Assad government’s war on civilians in the wake of Arab Spring protests. Over the 14 years of civil war, the SETF became a mainstay of the Syrian opposition in exile, and Moustafa became a well-regarded political operative working on behalf of the Syrian people in Washington.
In 2014, Moustafa was put in touch with a Syrian military police photographer who fled the country with a flash drive containing evidence of systematic torture and mass executions in Assad’s prisons. The whistleblower, known publicly as “Caesar,” was First Lieutenant Farid al-Madhhan, a name he kept hidden for years to protect himself and his family, and only revealed after Assad’s fall in December 2024.
“The pictures were reminiscent of the worst moments of history,” Moustafa said. “Emaciated, tortured bodies, eyes gouged out, men, women, children, elderly, on a massive scale.”
The images set off a five-year lobbying campaign led by Moustafa, culminating in the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, signed by President Trump in December 2019, which sanctioned Assad regime officials and cut Syria off from the international financial system.
“When we drafted the Caesar Act,” Moustafa said, “we took all of that to pass a law that very specifically addressed the machinery of death of the Assad regime and how it needed to stop.”
After Assad’s ouster in December 2024, the Caesar sanctions, so effective at strangling his regime, threatened to do the same to Syria’s new government. So Moustafa enlisted Hamra’s help.
Moustafa had known Hamra since 2013 through his friendship with Abraham Hamra, Henry’s uncle. They had connected through Moustafa’s efforts to save Judaica from the Jobar Synagogue after it was bombed by forces loyal to Assad.
The friendship would result in Hamra, who still resists describing himself as a political person, running for parliament in Syria’s first open elections since the Ba’ath party seized power in 1963. It would bring his father to recite a blessing over Ahmad al-Sharaa, the Islamist rebel commander who now serves as Syria’s president. And their relationship, and the efforts that followed, would help pave the way for the lifting of the U.S. sanctions regime that had cut Syria off from the global economy.
“Would Caesar have been lifted without the Syrian Jewish community? I don’t believe it would have been,” Moustafa said.
President Donald Trump officially lifted the Caesar sanctions on Dec. 19, 2025, when he signed the FY 2026 NDAA into law, a year after Assad’s ouster. By May 2025, the Treasury had already issued a 180-day waiver on the other sanctions, but the Caesar sanctions remained in place, only to be repealed by an act of Congress.
This was Moustafa’s target, and the first step, as Moustafa recalled, was to help get the Hamras back to Syria. But there was much work to be done between that initial phone call and the moment Hamra set foot in Syria for the first time in more than 30 years.
As Moustafa recalled, he and Hamra spoke by phone every day in the weeks leading up to the trip. Hamra had a list of demands they had to work through, including an official letter from the Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs welcoming the group, meant to ease fears after decades of persecution under Assad.
“They just liberated it. There’s no staff, there’s nothing set up yet. How can I get you a paper?” Moustafa recalled telling him.
Also on Hamra’s list: He wanted at least 10 Jews on the first trip, so his father Yosef could pray with a quorum at the Faranj Synagogue in the heart of Damascus’s Jewish Quarter, the same synagogue where Yosef had prayed as a child and where he last led services before the family left Syria in 1992.
Syrian Jews in America had for years sought to maintain civil relations with a regime that still housed remnants of their family, and their properties. A delegation visited the regime in 2004 as Syria sought to head off a sanctions regime, and some in the community marked the death in 2000 of Hafez Assad with a black sash mourning.
That demand proved impossible to meet. As Moustafa and Hamra sought to fill the spots, security concerns led most prospective travelers to back out in the days before departure. The question of whether the trip would happen at all remained unresolved until the day before, when Hamed Khanatri (then the head of Syria’s foreign ministry) called Henry to say: “We’re waiting for you,” he recounted.
“The Syrian Jewish community has suffered enormously, both before the 2011 conflict and throughout it,” Moustafa said. “Like so many Syrians, they suffered under the regime.”
Having seen firsthand what the Assad government had done to Syrian Jews, including property confiscations and travel bans, Moustafa wanted them to see for themselves whether the transitional government meant what it was telling the international community about leaving behind its jihadist past and severing ties with designated terror groups.
In the year between Assad’s fall and the repeal of the Caesar sanctions in December 2025, the SETF organized three trips to Syria, bringing members of both the Syrian and American Jewish communities to meet with high-level Syrian officials and visit Jewish historic sites in the country.
Lawrence Schiffman, professor of Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University, who joined the first trip in February 2025, said the engagement felt real, even if the motivations behind it were pragmatic.
“I think it was genuine,” he said. “Let’s be realistic. They were setting up an attempt to get into good relations with Syrian Jews, and they needed American help.”
For Schiffman, the motivations of the transitional government mattered less than what it was actually doing, including efforts to document lost Jewish property and begin a process of restitution and restoration for the Syrian Jewish community, according to Hamra.
“Syrian Jews here are partly intentionally serving the same role that certain Jewish organizations served in visiting the UAE and Saudi Arabia, softening the ground before official [state] visits,” Schiffman said. “We did not negotiate with them. We were there to learn what their views are. It was a goodwill mission.”
Rabbi Mendy Chitrik, head of the Ashkenazi community in Istanbul and a key contact for Syria’s Jewish community during the civil war who helped facilitate kosher product deliveries to Damascus, joined another trip. He recalled walking through the lanes of Damascus’ souk wearing his kippah without incident.
“I walked through Damascus freely,” he said. “We did not feel or experience any hostility.”
The culmination of their efforts, as both Moustafa and Hamra described it, was their visit to Washington in November 2025, the final push before passage of the defense authorization bill, into which they sought to insert a provision repealing the Caesar sanctions.
In a one-on-one meeting with South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilson, Henry recounted that it was his father’s words that Wilson later said had changed his mind. When Wilson asked whether the new Syrian leadership would be good for Syria, Rabbi Hamra’s answer was simple: “I think everybody deserves another chance.”
A spokesperson for Wilson confirmed the meetings, “Wilson met with Rabbi Yosef and Henry Hamra on multiple occasions in the lead-up to the vote. Their perspective did give the Congressman encouragement,” the spokesperson wrote to JTA. “He mentioned the Rabbi’s stance on multiple occasions when advocating to colleagues.” Wilson has become an outspoken critic of Israel’s post-Assad regime incursions into the country, saying it is inhibiting the country’s rehabilitation.
Henry Hamra said Wilson carried as his message throughout the sanctions fight. Moustafa also said it was the Hamra family’s testimony and meetings that helped bring around Rep. Gregory Meeks, the New Yorker who is the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, and Rep. French Hill, an Arkansas Republican, two other figures who had stood in the way of sanctions relief.
Hill did not comment on the role of the Syrian Jewish expats in relieving the sanctions but said in in a statement to JTA that the relief was necessary.
“The Trump administration is doing the right thing by re-engaging diplomatically and taking steps to help Syria rejoin the community of nations,” he said. “I will continue to work with my colleagues and stakeholders to ensure that American support advances responsible governance and lasting stability for the Syrian people.”
Meeks did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Al-Sharaa was also in Washington during that period, working to build goodwill with the Trump administration. It was not al-Sharaa’s first meeting with Trump. In May 2025, al-Sharaa met with the president in Riyadh on the sidelines of a Gulf Cooperation Council summit.
Al-Sharaa had himself been designated a terrorist by the United States — a designation that was unwound only after Assad’s fall, with the bounty on his head lifted in December 2024 and the full designation removed in July 2025.
Ahmad Sharawi of the Foundation for Defense of Democracy said that meeting may have been the turning point for Trump’s decision to lift sanctions, which he did by executive order, though only those he could repeal unilaterally.
“What I think happened is that during President Trump’s visit to Riyadh, Mohammed bin Salman spoke with him, and convinced him in what I believe was a single conversation,” Sharawi said. “That’s when al-Sharaa met with Trump as well.”
He added, “I do think they [Syrian Jews] played a role with Congress when it came to the Caesar Act specifically, because it required congressional approval.”
Even with Saudi Arabia lobbying for sanctions relief, and, according to The New York Times, an intensive push by Syrian expatriates in the Gulf with stakes in development contracts and real estate in the rebuilding country, Congress still had to sign off on the repeal. Trump is a fan of al-Sharaa, calling him “attractive” and a “tough guy” when they met in Riyadh in May, Reports have already emerged of a Trump Tower planned for Damascus.
Moustafa knew that one of Syria’s other central challenges would be its relationship with Israel, a conflict that had never been formally resolved since Israel seized the Golan Heights in 1967. In the days after Assad’s fall, Israeli airstrikes destroyed up to 80% of Syria’s strategic military capabilities.
Moustafa vividly recalled the moment a missile struck outside the building where he had just finished a four-hour meeting with President al-Sharaa.
“About an hour after I left that meeting, Israel struck the front door of the presidential palace,” he said. “I heard it and watched it happen.” He added: “The Syrian president said to me, ‘I don’t want to go back to war for 7,000 more years.’”
Israel has maintained a harsh posture toward the new Syrian government since Assad’s fall. Netanyahu declared that Israel would not allow forces loyal to Syria’s new rulers to operate in southern Syria, and demanded full demilitarization of the provinces of Quneitra, Daraa, and Sweida.
An Israeli official told the Times of Israel that Netanyahu personally asked Trump not to lift sanctions on Syria during a visit to Washington, citing fears of a cross-border attack similar to Hamas’s Oct. 7 assault. Ron Dermer, Netanyahu’s close aide and minister of strategic affairs, was widely reported to have lobbied Congress to keep the sanctions in place, or at a minimum, to preserve conditions that would allow them to be reimposed.
Others in the Israeli security establishment are similarly skeptical. Sarit Zehavi, the founder and president of the Alma Research and Education Center in Israel, sees the new Syrian government as Islamist in all but name.
Zehavi’s family is originally from Damascus. As she recounted to JTA, her family of jewelers, among the wealthiest in the city, lived in the historic Beit Lisbona in the Harat al-Yahud, the old Jewish quarter.
When Bashar Assad was finally ousted in December 2024, Zehavi was eager to return and see her family’s home for the first time. Her own staff had to talk her out of it. “My research staff had to convince me that there is no chance that I am going to Damascus in the near future to see my father’s house because things are not going to get better,” she said.
She was hopeful at first, but reports of massacres committed against Alawites on the coast, and then against the Druze in Sweida, soured her faith in the new government.
“It took a while until I understood that what is happening in Syria is far from liberation,” she said.
Zehavi said she was surprised by the lobbying undertaken by her fellow Jewish expats. “It seems counterintuitive that Syrian Jews living in Brooklyn would try to get the sanctions lifted on someone who was in Al-Qaeda. He’s a jihadist,” she said, while reserving her sharpest criticism for the Trump administration’s decision to lift the Caesar sanctions without conditions.
“You need timed demands and benchmarks that would indicate that Ahmed al-Sharaa is truly what we all hoped he would be,” she said. “They lifted it without any conditions. That’s the main problem.”
Zehavi is skeptical that the Syrian Jewish community’s goals will be served by the move. “If what they said is true, that this way they can reestablish Jewish institutions in Damascus, that’s a very nice goal, and maybe they’re right,” she said. “But in the bigger picture, I’m not sure it will lead in a positive direction.”
Yosef Hamra had been scheduled to testify before the Helsinki Commission, the U.S. branch of the multiparliamentary human rights monitor, during his visit to Congress in November 2025, but the hearing was canceled. In a copy of his prepared remarks obtained by JTA, he wrote: “It is a shame that today the Caesar Act punishes the Syrian people, Muslims, Christians and Jews, Arabs and Kurds, for the crimes of a regime that has been deposed.”
Before he met with Trump, Yosef Hamra — wearing a kippah — recited a blessing over Ahmad al-Sharaa.
It was an ending fit for such an improbable alliance: a Palestinian-Syrian activist and a Syrian Jewish cantor working together to reopen a country ripped apart by 14 years of civil war. For the Hamras, the blessing was more than a public declaration of faith in the new government — it was proof that something had shifted. But whether Syria’s future would bring democracy and equality for its multi-ethnic population was a question neither Hamra nor Moustafa could answer.
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Mamdani faces growing pressure over Jewish NYPD Commissioner Tisch and over Israel from left flank
(JTA) — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing increasing pressure from some on the leftmost flank of his voting coalition, and an ICE shooting Thursday led democratic socialist allies to add their voices to a major demand: dump police commissioner Jessica Tisch.
“The NYPD’s Strategic Response Group must be disbanded as quickly as possible, and Commissioner Tisch must step down,” said Darializa Avila Chevalier, who won her Democratic primary with Mamdani’s endorsement. The democratic socialist, who is expected to join Congress next year representing Upper Manhattan and parts of the Bronx, was referring to the heavily armed police department unit that often responds to protests.
The calls for Tisch’s removal follow strident criticism of the mayor from pro-Palestinian activists on Wednesday night who called him names, including “traitor” and “Ziohran,” when he showed up at an Oct. 7 Israeli peace vigil mourning the loss of both Jewish and Palestinian lives. The demonstrators assailed him for not doing more to advance the pro-Palestinian agenda that has long been central to his political beliefs, raising questions over whether he could lose parts of his base as he pledges to be a mayor for all New Yorkers.
The demand for Tisch’s removal came after an ICE agent shot and wounded a Dominican man in his car on Thursday afternoon while his 5-year-old son was in the back seat. Avila Chevalier, who joined protests against ICE on Thursday, wrote on X that the NYPD “spent more time protecting a militia that just shot someone than protecting New Yorkers.”
Mamdani’s decision last year to retain Tisch — a self-described “proud Zionist” who comes from a prominent Jewish family — was seen as a reassuring move by moderates and establishment Jewish organizations including UJA-Federation of New York and the Jewish Community Relations Council. (70 Faces Media, the parent company of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and New York Jewish Week, receives UJA funding.)
A number of progressives were skeptical of the decision at the time, citing her background as an appointee of Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams, and her past criticism of campus pro-Palestinian protests. Some viewed her as an impediment to criminal justice reform.
Meanwhile, some on the left have dinged him for not yet following through on campaign promises 10 months into his term, including dissolving the Strategic Response Group, or backing down from his vow to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a plan which he later said he did not have the power to execute.
Anti-Zionist groups including Pal-Awda, Within Our Lifetime and a number of student organizations who rallied against Mamdani at the Oct. 7 vigil accused him of succumbing “to Zionist pressure.” Protesters called him a “traitor” and a number of chants rang out including, “Mayor Mamdani you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” drowning out speakers at the vigil and forcing the organizers to move it behind police barricades to keep the protesters from overrunning the event.
Among those protesters’ many gripes with the mayor was his decision to retain Tisch. One sign at the demonstration depicted Mamdani with the text, “Chief Executive of the NYPD SRG” with a Star of David in the middle, and a name tag on the mayor’s chest reading, “Ziohran.”
Criticism was also directed at Mamdani for not stopping Israeli real estate events at synagogues, and for his strategy to combat antisemitism, released last week, which allocates funds to a number of community-based organizations aimed at preventing hate crimes. Some critics have charged that some of the funding will aid Zionist organizations.
“The Jewish community is a large part of New York and it should be cherished. But you cannot fund these Anti-Defamation Leagues that prioritize Zionism over Judaism,” a John Jay College student protester, who declined to be named, told JTA during the demonstration.
On Thursday, the Democratic Socialists of America’s New York City chapter — which Mamdani has called his “political home” — wrote that Tisch “must end NYPD complicity with ICE” and that if she “cannot put a stop to these injustices, she must be fired.”
“Abolish ICE. Disband the SRG. Fire Tisch,” wrote Illapa Sairitupac, a fellow democratic socialist who won the Democratic nomination for a Lower Manhattan State Assembly district. Mamdani endorsed both Sairitupac and Avila Chevalier this past year.
While some protesters at the vigil said they were Mamdani voters — and one speaker even identified herself as a former intern for the now-mayor — some of the mayor’s allies have stressed that the crowd protesting him was not representative of his base.
“If I had to gamble, I would gamble that the vast majority of them were people who never supported him,” activist Abby Stein told JTA on Thursday night, during the Mazals gala held by left-wing group Jews for Racial & Economic Justice. Mamdani was due to attend the JFREJ event, but because of the ICE shooting was instead in the Bronx, where he denounced the federal agency and demanded that it cease its operations in New York City.
Many of the signs excoriating Mamdani at Wednesday’s protest outside of City Hall were signed with the name of the Maoist Communist Union, an organization that opposed Mamdani before he took office. Some protesters were handing out copies of Spartacist, the Trotskyist International Communist League’s journal.
“We certainly didn’t support Mamdani or vote for him,” said Erica Jones, among the Trotskyist protesters. “We knew he was running as a Democrat and he would be as big of a sellout as AOC and Bernie Sanders and all the rest of those who claim to have, at one time, stood for socialism but in reality, stand for the capitalist masters who are oppressing us all.”
Stein, a member of the DSA in addition to JFREJ, called out some of the protesters’ rhetoric and the choice to crash the Israelis for Peace Oct. 7 vigil. But she also acknowledged that there was overlap between their demands and her views, including over the police commissioner.
“There are things that people are upset over that I think are legit — like keeping Jessica Tisch on, for example,” Stein said. “A lot of us were not very happy about it.”
Ultimately, Stein said there is “always going to be something to protest” with any politician, and pointed to a quote from New York’s mayor in the 1970s and ‘80s, Ed Koch: “If you agree with me on 9 out of 12 issues, vote for me. If you agree with me on 12 out of 12 issues, see a psychiatrist.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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A planned non-Zionist Jewish school in Boston hopes to ride the momentum of the left
(JTA) — BOSTON — In the middle of a conversation about her future children, it dawned on Leah Robbins that the school she imagined for them did not exist.
Robbins envisioned a Jewish school where children studied Jewish texts, history and observance, as she did at the school run out of her Conservative synagogue in northern Florida. But having long ago rejected the allegiance to Israel that was entwined with her education, she could not fathom sending her children to a school that promoted Zionism — which ruled out all the Jewish day schools she knew.
“I was just overwhelmed with a sense of grief that my kids could be less Jewishly educated than I was,” Robbins, who has lived in Boston for 10 years, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I would never ever consider sending my kids to any of the local day schools because of total values misalignment.”
Four years after that conversation, Robbins is building her own institution for the children she hopes to have. She plans to open Achvat Olam, a “diasporist” day school whose name translates to “global solidarity” in Hebrew, in the Boston area in fall 2029. The school aims to launch with eight to 10 families, starting with a kindergarten and adding grade levels until ultimately becoming a K-8 school.
Achvat Olam is fiscally sponsored by Beloved Builders, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit that supports progressive Jewish projects. Robbins, who has a background in fundraising for Jewish nonprofits, hopes to raise $625,000 for the launch. She said she has met about 20 local families who expressed interest, and will start formal recruitment efforts, including focus groups and open houses, next year.
Achvat Olam will teach about Jewish history, cultures and languages outside of Israel, while engaging with Hebrew and Israel’s history from a non-Zionist perspective. The school’s website includes a page on “Israel/Palestine,” saying its community will share a belief that “the pursuit of justice, dignity, and thriving for all people is a Jewish moral imperative.”
“This includes an age-appropriate, honest confrontation with Zionism and the ongoing Nakba against the Palestinian people,” the website says, using the Arabic word for the displacement of over 700,000 Palestinians at the time of the State of Israel’s founding. The school also says that students will consider “the complicity and support of the US government and Diaspora Jews.”
Micah-Shalom Kesselman is the parent of a 4-year-old in Medford, Massachusetts, and participates in local left-wing Jewish groups such as the Boston Workers Circle. He’s disappointed that his son Oren will age out of Achvat Olam by the time it is scheduled to open as a kindergarten. “I would super want Oren to attend something like what Achvat Olam is shaping up to be,” he said.
Kesselman, who studies Yiddish with his son, explained that he would like Oren to be steeped in Jewish traditions and culture. But as a parent who is “not a supporter of Zionism,” he said he has found few Jewish educational opportunities that match his beliefs.
Diverse day school histories
Jewish day schools have historically encompassed a range of orientations toward Israel, according to Jonathan Krasner, a historian of American Jewish education at Brandeis University. The modern day school movement was born in the 1920s and initially dominated by orthodox schools, some of which did not emphasize Zionism. In the 1950s, secular Yiddishist schools taught varied attitudes toward Israel. Some yeshivas in the orthodox Haredi movement still today oppose Zionism on religious grounds, believing that Jewish sovereignty should only be established through the coming of the Messiah.
But Krasner could not name another day school that has Achvat Olam’s goal: education for Jewish families who disavow the current-day political realities of Israel and Zionism. In the aftermath of the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, many day schools went the opposite direction, adding curricula to strengthen solidarity between Diaspora Jews and Israel.
“The initial response of the organized Jewish community was, understandably, to circle the wagons and to reinforce their connections to Israel and to the Israeli people,” Krasner said.
Jack Wertheimer, a professor of American Jewish history at the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary, isn’t convinced that Achvat Olam will change that trend. He said he was “highly skeptical” that Robbins could attract enough families to sustain a school. According to historical data, he said, Jews who lean more politically left tend to be less engaged in Jewish life.
“From what I know, the overwhelming majority of parents who are interested in sending their children to Jewish day schools are pro-Israel,” said Wertheimer.
Nonetheless, Robbins believes that the market for her school is growing. Survey after survey has captured a drop in Americans’ support for Israel since the Gaza war, and Jews are not an exception to the trend. After decades of being treated as fringe in many of their communities, left-wing Jews who are anti-Zionist — or simply do not see Israel as part of their identity — say that instead of adapting to their congregations and Jewish schools, the institutions should adapt to them.
There are signs that this group makes up a substantial portion of Jews in the United States. About 30% of Jewish adults believe that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, according to a June poll of 1,022 Jews from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, which had a 5% error margin. Less than 40% said that “supporting Israel” was crucial to their Jewish identity.
Younger Jews emphasize traditions
At the same time, among adults who identified as religiously Jewish, younger people said they emphasized Jewish traditions more than their older counterparts. Younger Jews were more likely than older ones to say that “celebrating Jewish holidays” and “celebrating or marking Shabbat” were important to them, while Jews over 45 placed more emphasis on “remembering the Holocaust” and “supporting Israel” than younger ones.
This finding could reflect the growing share of younger Jews who are Orthodox. It also comes amid a boom in Jewish leftist organizations that explicitly ground their activism in religious tradition. IfNotNow, an anti-occupation group that has grown from 1,000 dues-paying members in 2023 to 7,000 this year, says it is “growing a community rooted in Jewish values and ritual.” The anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace, which has amassed 32,000 dues-paying members, often frames its protests through Jewish holidays, texts and prayer.
Robbins is betting that a significant pool of younger Jews, many of them now parents to young children, are seeking avenues to both protect their Jewish traditions and reset their community’s relationship with Israel for the next generation. Instead of supporting Israel, Achvat Olam says that its students will learn a curriculum of “collective liberation at home, globally, and in Israel/Palestine.”
“This is a very experimental moment in Jewish history. The Jewish left is growing by leaps and bounds,” said Robbins, referencing estimates of dozens of anti-Zionist congregations and prayer groups sprouting across the country. “There is hunger for this.”
Boston is a hub for such new organizations. Since 2024, the city has hosted the Conference on the Jewish Left at Boston University, a gathering of left-wing Jewish scholars, students, activists and faith leaders. The first annual meeting drew 300 people, the second 700, and the third in February saw more than 900 participants. A poll of Greater Boston by Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the central fundraising arm of Boston’s Jewish community, found earlier this year that 38% of Jews aged 18 to 29 identified as “anti-Zionist,” and another 30% said they were “uncommitted” to Zionism or anti-Zionism.
Rabbi Greg Hersh left his congregation at Temple Emmanuel in Wakefield, north of Boston, in 2024. He said he became increasingly alienated from his congregants after Oct. 7. Hersh felt that the congregation, focused on supporting Israel and fighting antisemitism locally, did not share his anguish about the deaths of Palestinians.
Last year, Hersh founded V’ahavtah, a mostly Cambridge-based congregation devoted to “practicing Judaism beyond Zionism.” V’ahavtah joined Jews, like him, who felt uncomfortable with the norm of Israeli flags flying inside synagogues. Their Shabbat services regularly draw 30 to 40 people, numbers he said he never saw in Wakefield. He believes that is proof of growing demand for non-Zionist Jewish institutions.
“You take Israel out of the equation and the Jews will show up, and that’s what happened with V’ahavtah,” said Hersh. “My expectation is Achvat Olam is going to be very well poised to fill that void.”
On the ground, Robbins faces formidable obstacles to funding Achvat Olam. Jewish day schools struggle across the country to attract enrollment in the face of tuition that many families can’t afford, along with budgets strained by economic uncertainty and heightened spending to ward off security threats. Earlier this year, MetroWest Jewish Day School in Framingham, a suburb of Boston, shuttered and said that its “model of highly individualized Jewish day school education is no longer sustainable.”
Heavy investments from local philanthropies have helped day schools offset high costs. Prizmah, a national network of 305 day schools, recently reported that it saw enrollment rise across denominations for the first time last year, thanks in large part to philanthropy.
But many groups that fund Jewish education hold values that are antithetical to Robbins’ — including CJP, which calls itself a “pro-Israel, Zionist organization.” Prizmah and CJP declined requests for comment from JTA.
The individual donors who fund Jewish schools also tend to be older, more conservative than Robbins and more motivated by support for Israel, according to Krasner.
“The people who are most likely to be in a financial position to support day schools with generous philanthropic gifts are demographically very different from the population that Leah is trying to attract,” he said.
Robbins admitted that funding challenges meant the success of Achvat Olam was not “any sort of inevitability.” But she believes there is inevitability to the political momentum that could drive families toward such a school. “Something I want to convey to people is that the train has already left the station,” she said. “There is no stemming the tide of the growth of the Jewish left.”
Robbins has turned to funding from left-wing organizations, which already siphon much of their resources to grassroots activism, legal defense and awareness campaigns.
“It can be hard to get in the face of people to make the case for something that requires long-game thinking,” she said. “I’m trying to make the case, when the last fire has been put out, what’s going to be left if we’re not building it right now?”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Protesters in Toronto: ‘We will honor all our martyrs’ after 3 years of Gaza war
(JTA) — TORONTO – Hundreds of protesters marched through Toronto’s downtown core via Yonge Street Saturday afternoon, chanting more loudly as additional people joined the demonstration. “We will honor all our martyrs, all our children, sons and daughters!” and “In my lifetime I will see Palestinians living free!” the crowd yelled in unison.
Separated by metal barricades and police officers, a much smaller group of counterprotesters waving Israeli and Iranian flags stood at the southern end of Sankofa Square, where the demonstrators gathered before the march to mark the third anniversary of the war in Gaza.
Trailing behind a white Ford F-150 equipped with speakers, protesters at one point shouted, “Overthrow the Epstein class,” a slogan referring to disgraced Jewish financier Jeffrey Epstein to decry the global elite and call for the ultra-wealthy to be stripped of power. Tensions briefly flared when a man wearing a Turning Point Canada sweatshirt confronted a group of pro-Palestinian demonstrators.
Otherwise, the protest was largely peaceful. Toronto police said that one individual was arrested at the demonstration after being recognized by officers as someone wanted in connection with an unrelated incident.
The protest was part of a broader international wave of demonstrations, with the Israeli Ministry for Diaspora Affairs counting 17 protests in Canada planned for Saturday through Wednesday, including in Montreal and Ottawa.
The demonstrators included Jews and Israelis who are highly critical of the prosecution of the war in Gaza and Zionism as a whole. “I went to school in Haifa, and I saw how Palestinians are treated,” said pro-Palestinian protester Shlomit, 65, who didn’t provide a last name due to concerns for her safety. “I grew up in a very Zionist family, but being in Israel actually changed my mind about things.”
Shlomit said she had mutual friends with Vivian Silver, a Canadian-Israeli peace activist who was murdered on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, launching the Gaza war. She said she was emotionally impacted by Silver’s death, and believes the kind of work like Silver’s was critical to building peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
“I knew all these people who were connected to [Vivian]. She was a peace activist, and what happened to her was distressing to me,” said Shlomit, who wore a pin labeled “Jews Against Occupation.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney mentioned Silver in a statement on Wednesday, the three-year anniversary of Oct. 7 itself. “Canada unequivocally condemns Hamas, which must play no role in the future governance of a demilitarised Palestinian state,” read Carney’s statement. “We stand steadfastly with the Israeli people in their pursuit of a safe and secure Israel as part of a two-state solution.”
The statement continued by commemorating the Canadian lives lost to the Hamas attack, mentioning Silver and eight others. “We remember them for the lives they lived and the people they loved – and we honour the families and friends who continue to mourn their loss. May their memory be a blessing,” he said.
Other demonstrators expressed solidarity with issues beyond the Middle East. Caelen Leizer-Romalis, 24, was attending the protest as part of the Revolutionary Communist Party. “We have an obligation as Canadians to stand up to imperialism,” said Leizer-Romalis, who is Jewish. “In order to liberate the people of Palestine, we need to liberate the workers here as well.”
Despite being outnumbered, pro-Israel demonstrators — all of whom carried either an Iranian flag or a picture of the last shah of Iran before his ouster in the Iranian Revolution of 1979 — waved their flags as “Tel Aviv” by Omer Adam blasted from a boombox.
Mahya Tayabi, 38, decided to come to the protest to demonstrate unity between Israel and Iran. “I’m Persian, but I love Israel. I love Jewish people. Bibi and the IDF helped my country,” said Tayabi, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by his nickname. As Tayabi spoke, the boombox switched to playing an EDM beat featuring the lyrics “Ayatollah Khamenei is dead!” Israel and the United States killed the ayatollah at the beginning of the war on Iran that they launched in late February.
The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs expressed concern regarding the weekend’s protests.
“Canada’s Integrated Threat Assessment Centre has warned about the consequences of turning a blind eye: when targeting of the Jewish community becomes frequent and normalized, it can push susceptible individuals toward violence. Events praising the ‘resistance’ responsible for the October 7 atrocities as communities gather to mourn the murdered demands moral clarity from civic leaders about what is acceptable in our society.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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