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At soldiers’ graves, the rows keep growing: Israel’s Memorial Day is shaped by new loss
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — When Varda Morell stands by her son’s grave in Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl military cemetery this Memorial Day, the official ceremony unfolding nearby will barely register. That was true in the two Memorial Days since Maoz was killed in Gaza in February 2024. What she will see instead is a swath of fresh graves, the once-empty section where he is buried now completely full.
“Each time we’ve come to visit his grave, there’s another row and another row and another row,” she said.
Across Israel, families marking Memorial Day, known as Yom Hazikaron, are doing so this year against a backdrop of continued fighting, successive ceasefires and a steady stream of new casualties, turning what is meant to be a day of remembrance into one that, for many, isn’t rooted in the past. The Israeli government says 170 soldiers and security personnel were killed since Yom Hazikaron last year.
For the sixth consecutive year, the official ceremonies did not follow their traditional format, after successive disruptions that began with the pandemic and later included political turmoil, wildfires and wartime restrictions.
For Morell, the recent “cleared for publication” announcements naming soldiers killed in Lebanon have brought it all back. “My heart feels sick just thinking about it,” she said on her way to deliver a Memorial Day talk at her son’s paratrooper base. “I remember what those first days were like, and what those families are going through now that they’ve joined this club. The club that no one wants to be a part of.”
In recent years, a growing number of bereaved families have chosen to boycott official ceremonies altogether. More than 150 signed a letter last week urging coalition lawmakers not to speak at military cemeteries, saying their loved ones’ graves should not be used as a “political platform for divisive messages.” Many still gather at the graveside with their families or communities, while others have said it was too painful to visit on the day itself.
Orit Shimon, who lost her son Dotan in September 2024, said that after her daughter Nufar was killed in a traffic accident in 2013, she came to see Yom Hazikaron as “as holy as Yom Kippur,” marking it by visiting her grave and then returning home to watch television programs about fallen soldiers. But after her son was killed in Gaza, she stopped watching altogether. Her connection to him, she said, is not at his grave but in the photos and videos she returns to again and again.
This year, despite her husband’s objections, Shimon chose not to send out messages inviting people to come and pay their respects, but expects that neighbors from her West Bank settlement of Elazar will come anyway.
“We don’t need a Memorial Day — it’s for other people. Every day is Memorial Day for us,” she said.
Shimon was among more than 450 bereaved parents who spent the weekend ahead of Memorial Day together at a Tel Aviv hotel, part of an annual retreat organized by OneFamily, an Israeli nonprofit that supports families of fallen soldiers and victims of terror. The organization held its own Yom Hazikaron ceremony in Jerusalem, designed as a space for bereaved families to share their stories openly with one another, rather than participate in the formal national commemorations. A day after Memorial Day, on Israel’s Independence Day, OneFamily founder, Chantal Belzberg, will officially receive the Israel Prize for lifetime achievement.
Amir Avivi, a retired top IDF official and founder of the Israel Defense and Security Forum, was slated to give an address over Shabbat on the regional geopolitical context. The weekend came just after successive ceasefires, first with Iran and then with Hezbollah, at a time when many Israelis argued the fighting had ended before the job was done — a question that, for some bereaved parents, was more acute, as they grappled with whether their sons’ deaths had been in vain.
But his message, Avivi said before the session, was “packed with optimism.”
“We need to look at the whole picture, not every ceasefire is the end of the world,” Avivi said, pointing to what he described as Israel’s string of gains since Oct. 7, from the degradation of Hamas and Hezbollah to the campaign against the regime in Tehran. “Who would have imagined America fighting side by side with Israel to take out an existential threat? I fully believe a golden age is coming.”
In another session, led by Eti Ablin, a clinical social worker and bereavement specialist, the discussion turned to the months and years after the loss. Some spoke about going from ceremony to ceremony in the first year, while others said that over time, the visits and calls from supporters had become less frequent.
One woman said that in the months after her son was killed, the constant presence of visitors had felt overwhelming, but that in the years since, she had noticed neighbors crossing the street to avoid her.
Another parent, whose son was killed at the Nova music festival, described organizing a birthday gathering in his memory that drew hundreds of people. “It’s up to us to make people come,” he said, before breaking down.
Ablin, who co-chairs a national forum on grief and bereavement, said hope requires an active effort. “Hope is not the same as saying, ‘it will be okay,’” she said. “There’s no expiration date to the pain. So you have to put boundaries around it and learn how to find your way out of it.”
Tali Marom from Ra’anana, whose son Roee, a squad commander, was killed early in the war, said that idea resonated. “We learn to live alongside the pit of despair and we build exit strategies for when we fall into it,” she said.
Being with other bereaved parents, she said, was one of those ways out.
“I don’t know how I would have gotten through this Shabbat without this,” she said, gesturing to the room. “I may not know who that woman is over there, but I know what she’s going through.”
At dinner, the conversation turned to a law requiring bereaved parents to sign off on combat service for surviving children. Marom said she had been asked to approve such a request for her daughter, describing it as a burden she had never imagined.
Another parent said he had to sign repeatedly as his son crossed into Lebanon during operations, because each crossing of an international border required renewed authorization, forcing him to confront the emotional weight of that decision each time.
“Thank God I don’t have that to deal with as well,” a third parent said.
Other discussions turned to what people did with their children’s belongings after their deaths.
Nechama Aharon, from Pardes Hanna, whose son Yogev was killed on Oct. 7 battling Hamas at the Kissufim base in the Gaza envelope, said she has no intention of parting with any of his belongings, saying it matters more to her than visiting his grave, which she does twice a year — on the anniversary of his death and on Memorial Day.
“No matter what happens, I’ll never touch anything in his room. I’m leaving absolutely everything the way it was,” she said. “I know that he might not be with me physically, but this way I feel like I’m preserving his memory.”
Shimon said that, for her, holding on to her son had come to mean making sense of the way he died.
“For a long time, I couldn’t think about anything except that I no longer had my son,” she said. “Another year has passed in which he could have been alive, and he’s not. But slowly I came to realize he didn’t die in a car accident. He was doing what he wanted to do. He went to bring the hostages back. His death was not meaningless.”
Morell said she has tried to preserve her son’s memory through projects in his name, including a film about his life for friends, family and Jewish communities in the United States, where she grew up, to connect to his story.
She contrasted the experience with America’s Memorial Day, describing it as largely detached from the reality of loss, marked more by sales and barbecues than remembrance.
“Here it’s so different,” she said. “It’s so moving to me that thousands and thousands of people, many of whom are strangers, come to pay their respects. And we know that even when we’re not around any more, a soldier will be sent to stand by Maoz’s grave. His legacy will live on. That gives us a lot of comfort.”
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ICE targets an anti-Israel protester — this time, a Hasidic Jew
(JTA) — Yehonatan Ovadia, an Orthodox Jew from the anti-Zionist Satmar Hasidic sect, has joined a number of protests around New York and New Jersey against Israel.
Now, he’s at risk of being deported there.
Ovadia, 35, is originally from Israel and moved to the U.S. on a temporary religious worker visa in 2022, according to the text of a lawsuit requesting Ovadia’s release. His legal status in the U.S. was revoked earlier this year in connection with a November 2023 protest that he attended during which an Israeli flag was taken down from the town hall of Ramapo, New York. Ovadia said he was there but did not tear down the flag, and hate crimes charges against him were dropped.
But after a request to extend his stay in the United States was denied on the grounds of that protest, according to government documents shared with JTA, Ovadia was detained by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in August, and remains in ICE custody in New York.
“In violation of our nation’s laws, he overstayed his welcome and refused to depart,” a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “He will receive due process and remain in ICE custody pending the outcome of his immigration proceedings.”
ICE’s nationwide surge affected the area’s Jewish community earlier this year when the agency detained Ari Ladino, a Jewish bridal shop owner in Teaneck, New Jersey, and his mother. Both are originally from Bogota, Colombia.
Ovadia’s arrest by ICE comes as President Donald Trump’s administration has cracked down on pro-Palestinian activism, including with last year’s high-profile detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a prominent pro-Palestinian protest leader at Columbia University. The administration has accused Khalil and other pro-Palestinian activists and campus protesters of antisemitism.
Such an accusation would be particularly fraught against Ovadia, who is Jewish and holds anti-Israel views for religious reasons. Satmar Jews believe that a state of Israel cannot be established before the arrival of the Messiah.
In a lawsuit filed in August requesting Ovadia’s release, his lawyers argued that the Trump administration was penalizing him for protected speech motivated by religious beliefs. The government took “an official position,” Ovadia’s lawyers wrote, by preferring “one religious position within Judaism and [penalizing] an adherent of another.”
Unlike many Satmar Jews, who oppose Israel but are not active in political pro-Palestinian spaces, Ovadia has protested against Israel a number of times, including alongside members of the pro-Palestinian Hasidic group Neturei Karta.
His lawyer, Eric Lee, shared a statement from Ovadia on Wednesday after The New York Times broke the story of his detention: “From the Jewish people to our Palestinian brothers and sisters in Gaza and the West Bank and all over occupied Palestine! We didn’t forget from you! We are following you and we know that you are facing genocide! Please be strong and continue to believe!
“We know that the Zionist criminal war machine [is] torturing you every day and they want to silence you!” Ovadia said in his statement. “BUT we will be your voice! We will SHOUT AND DEMONSTRATE for you from New York, Washington, Canada, London and from every place that we can be free in the world!”
Chris Godshall-Bennet, another lawyer representing Ovadia, told JTA that the timeline on his client’s possible deportation is unclear, but the government designated Israel as “the location to which they would try to deport him” during a hearing on Wednesday morning.
Ovadia was one of two Hasidic men arrested in 2023 after a larger group protested outside Ramapo’s town hall, where an Israeli flag had been mounted a month earlier, shortly after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks. Surveillance footage showed at least four men removing the flag and then cutting it up with scissors, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service’s notice of denial to Ovadia. He denied having any role in removing the Israeli flag or knowing ahead of time that his companions would do so.
He was arrested and charged with criminal mischief, petit larceny and conspiracy, all as hate crimes. The hate crime charges were dropped and in February 2024 he pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, according to his lawsuit, resulting in a $200 fine plus an additional $125 charge.
“I said, ‘You know, I don’t have power, I’m out of money, I have no time, I am a teacher, I need to teach students every day,’” he told the Times. “‘Let’s end this with disorderly conduct.’”
With his religious worker visa set to expire in November 2025, Ovadia applied for a new visa in September, sponsored by Congregation Bnai Yoel in New York’s Orange County, according to USCIS denial notice. USCIS did not deny the request for the work visa, and said that Ovadia was not found to be “inadmissible” for a “conviction or commission of a crime involving moral turpitude.” But the federal agency did not approve the request either, and denied Ovadia an “extension of stay” in the country “as a matter of discretion,” citing the 2023 protest; without an extension of stay, Ovadia had no legal status in the U.S. following his visa’s November expiration.
The DHS said that it is “a privilege to be granted a visa or green card to live in the United States of America.”
“The Trump Administration acted well within its statutory and constitutional authority, as it does with any alien who advocates for violence, glorifies and supports terrorists, harasses Jews, and steals property,” DHS wrote.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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French far-right leader accused of antisemitism, defended by Israeli minister
(JTA) — A French far-right leader is battling antisemitism allegations days after his party made historic gains in the country’s Senate elections — and an Israeli cabinet minister has come to his defense.
Jordan Bardella, the president of France’s nationalist, anti-immigration National Rally, came under fire this week for accusations that he made antisemitic remarks in private messages.
The controversy arose after the National Rally, whose leaders have sought to distance the party from the antisemitic roots of its founders, jumped to at least 14 seats in the French Senate elections on Sunday. The results meant the party and its allies surpassed the 10-seat threshold to form a parliamentary group in the upper house for the first time.
The Senate will remain controlled by a traditional conservative and center-right alliance, though that bloc lost several seats. The National Rally’s progress will give it more funding and better representation in leadership roles and committees.
Mediapart, a left-leaning French investigative outlet, reported on Monday that Bardella years ago allegedly sent antisemitic statements, including messages that said “all the banks are owned by Jews” and “the Jew must dominated (sic) other peoples, crush them and rob them, a Zionist is necessarily and profoundly Jewish.”
The messages were allegedly sent between 2013 and 2015, during Bardella’s early years in the party, then called the National Front. He joined the party in 2012 at age 16.
Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli, who invited Bardella to a Jerusalem conference on antisemitism in 2025, defended him against the allegations. He told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he knows Bardella personally and that they are in regular contact.
Even if the quotes attributed to Bardella were authenticated, Chikli said, “a man is not sealed at 17. What matters is the 15 years that followed, and the man he became.”
Chikli referenced Bardella’s visit to the sites where Hamas killed Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023. He said that Bardella spoke in Jerusalem “against antisemitism and against anti-Zionism” and opposed President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state.
“No one will convince me that Jordan Bardella hates the Jewish people or the Jewish state,” said Chikli. “Just as no one will convince me that Emmanuel Macron respects them.”
Mediapart, which has a history of exposing political scandals, said it independently authenticated Bardella’s alleged conversations and drew them from a larger base of evidence corroborated by witness accounts. JTA has not independently verified the messages.
Bardella said on X that the alleged conversations were “blatant falsehoods” designed to undermine the National Rally ahead of France’s presidential election in April 2027. Marine Le Pen, the National Rally’s presidential candidate, is polling in first place as Macron prepares to step down because of term limits.
Mediapart, which has a history of exposing political scandals, said it independently authenticated Bardella’s alleged conversations and drew them from a larger base of evidence corroborated by witness accounts. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency has not independently verified the messages.
Bardella said on X that the alleged conversations were “blatant falsehoods” designed to undermine the National Rally ahead of France’s presidential election in April 2027. Marine Le Pen, the National Rally’s presidential candidate, is polling in first place as Emmanuel Macron prepares to step down because of term limits. Le Pen and Bardella have led the National Rally as a duo, and Bardella was set to be the party’s candidate until a July court ruling, which upheld criminal financial charges against Le Pen while also lifting a ban on her seeking public office. She has said she would name Bardella prime minister if she wins.
Bardella also said at a parliamentary meeting on Tuesday that he plans to take legal action against Mediapart, including possible complaints for forgery and forged documents, and accused the outlet of waging “total war” against his party. Le Pen, sitting next to Bardella, said that she had “absolute confidence” in him.
Israel’s Chikli said on social media that he and Bardella had common enemies. “Like the leftists in Israel, the leftists in France are experts at character assassination,” he said in his post, sharing a photo of himself shaking hands with Bardella at the Nova massacre site.
Chikli has cultivated ties between the Israeli government and European far-right parties, including others that have been criticized for histories of antisemitic and neo-Nazi figures in their ranks, such as Vox in Spain and the Sweden Democrats in Sweden.
Bardella, the National Rally and Chikli did not immediately respond to JTA requests for comment.
Chikli and Bardella both also accused Mediapart of a left-wing agenda. They each noted that the outlet’s co-founder, Edy Plenel, expressed sympathy in 1972 for the Palestinian militant group Black September, which killed 11 Israelis in a terrorist attack at the Munich Olympic Games that year. Plenel later disavowed those comments, which he said he made when he was 20.
Michel Wieviorka, a Jewish French sociologist who researches racism and extremism, told JTA that the antisemitism allegations strike at the heart of the National Rally’s aim to prove their “respectability.”
Le Pen has sought for over a decade to detoxify the party’s image. In 2015, she expelled from the party her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, a co-founder of the National Rally in 1972 who was repeatedly convicted of hate speech and Holocaust denial. Another founder and early leader of the party was Pierre Bousquet, who formerly served in the Nazi Waffen-SS.
Today, support for Israel has become key to the National Rally’s avowed renunciation of its antisemitic past.
“The strategy of [Bardella’s] party is to appear as the best friend of Jews, and Israel,” said Wieviorka.
Bardella invoked his visit to Israel in his denial of the alleged antisemitic messages.
“Since I began my political engagement, I have never had any ambiguity on the subject of the fight against antisemitism, to the point of being received, in 2025, by the Israeli government,” he said on X.
Meanwhile, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said on X that the accusations against Bardella revealed “the true face of the far right.”
“To all those with short memories: antisemitism is not a slip-up for the [National Rally], it is the history of this party,” said Barrot.
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In a time of uncertainty, European Jews renovate synagogues and dedicate Torah scrolls
(JTA) —
Getting a “200-year-old lady” ready for a major debut is quite a task. But in Vienna, the Jewish community’s historic main synagogue made it just in time for the Jewish New Year.
The “lady” — Vienna’s stately Stadttempel synagogue, or City Temple — has been rededicated after more than a year of top-to-bottom renovations, from floors to windows, to the heating and cooling systems, from safety features to restroom facilities. The job cost more than 10 million euros, or $11.3 million.
The synagogue was “still beautiful but has its signs of age,” Rabbi Jaron Engelmayer told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a phone interview. “And it wasn’t adequate for some matters of today.”
“The whole concept was sticking to what it was and still is, but it has a new face,” said Engelmayer, who has been chief rabbi of Vienna’s Jewish community since 2020. The Orthodox congregation also inaugurated a new Torah scroll in ceremonies Sept. 15. Parts of it incorporated earlier manuscripts “written in the old synagogue of the Middle Ages in Vienna,” making it a bridge to history, he said.
Large and small, Jewish communities in Europe are marking the season of renewal in concrete ways at a time of uncertainty seeded by antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment. In Budapest, the historic Rákospalota synagogue — used as a library warehouse for decades — recently held its first service in its renovated premises. And a 15-member Jewish prayer group in Leipzig has welcomed its first Torah scroll, on a 99-year loan.
All are looking to the future, whether fixing a hole in the roof or dedicating a holy book.
“Jews by definition have to be optimistic,” said Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, head of the Munich-based Conference of European Rabbis, which represents some 800 Orthodox Jewish communities.
“They have no other choice. And having said that, if in the past there was a tendency to say, ‘okay, the situation is bad over here, let’s go somewhere else,’ today, wherever you look, the situation is not good,” he said.
Taking action is more constructive than regretting current circumstances, said Rabbi Elisa Klapheck, head of Germany’s non-Orthodox General Rabbinical Assembly, which has 45 member rabbis. “We can lament antisemitism, we can lament attacks on Jewish communities, but that doesn’t help us,” she said. “So I think on a smaller scale, but maybe a much more resilient scale, the chagim [holidays] have shown that there was a positive atmosphere.”
Ruth Ellen Gruber, developer of the Jewish Heritage Europe portal, a project of the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe, expressed amazement at the pace of the rehabilitations.
“Despite increasing incidents of antisemitism, there are so many synagogue restoration projects that I cannot keep up,” said Gruber. Whether maintenance or preservation, all are “sign[s] of resilience among Jewish communities, volunteers, researchers, NGOs, civic bodies, and others,” she said in an email to JTA.
Examples include the Ashkenazi Great Synagogue in Constanta, Romania; the grand synagogue in Metz, France; the domed synagogue in Trencin, Slovakia; the Etz Hayyim Synagogue in Larissa, Greece; and the historic Yanbol synagogue in Istanbul.
“Some will serve as museums or cultural centers that usually house Jewish heritage exhibitions; others will serve as venues for both Jewish worship and cultural events,” she said.
In Leipzig, Rabbi Esther Jonas-Maerten doesn’t actually have a synagogue building for her Beth Ez Chaim “Lehrhaus,” a study group that meets in private homes. But she now has a Torah scroll for participants in the program, which is open to all who wish to learn more about Judaism.
The scroll, on a 99-year-loan from the Kehilat Shalom synagogue in Gaithersburg, Maryland, will be formally dedicated in ceremonies on Oct. 4. “That will be the first public event with our new Torah,” Jonas-Maerten, a Conservative rabbi, told JTA in a phone interview.
After a long and fruitless search for a scroll her group could afford, she asked Washington, D.C.-based Rabbi Lauren Tuchman to share her appeal: “I wrote a letter basically saying, ‘Most wanted! A sefer Torah!” Jonas-Maerten recalled. “Within two weeks, I got a response.”
The U.S.-Europe connection has been a fruitful one, when it comes to Torahs.
Last year, the Conservative congregation Ki Tov in Warsaw received the gift of a scroll from New Jersey sister congregation B’nai Sholom/Fair Lawn Jewish Center. The scroll, originally from Europe, was donated in memory of Holocaust survivors.
The independent Berlin-Brandenburg congregation Ohel Hachidush received its first scroll in 2008 from Shir Tikvah in Troy, Michigan, and purchased a second scroll in 2024 from retiring Rabbi Moshe Halfon of Mount Sinai Synagogue in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Both needed repair, especially the first one, Cantor Jalda Rebling, a Jewish Renewal movement ordainee who co-founded Ohel Hachidush with Anna Adam, told JTA.
“Its brokenness is also a symbol, I always say, for our Jewish history here in Europe,” said Rebling, “because all our Jewish lives are broken, and we all love this Torah.”
Vienna’s Jewish community currently has about 12,000 members. Before World War II, it numbered close to 200,000, according to the community’s website. Many fled, and about 47,000 Austrian Jews, most of them from Vienna, were murdered in the Holocaust.
Today’s community is “quite small in numbers, but very highly active and diverse in its traditions,” said Engelmayer, whose mother’s family came from Switzerland and father’s from Poland. “It goes from Ashkenazi to Sephardi, from secular to ultra-Orthodox, and it’s a whole range between. And it feels like a family.”
During Engelmayer’s tenure, “there was the COVID crisis and afterwards the war in Ukraine, which brought a lot of fugitives and refugees to Vienna – also Jews. And of course, the 7th of October, which brought a big rise in antisemitism, which is still being dealt with today.”
Nevertheless, celebrants went “through the streets of Vienna with high hats and proudly Jewish, bringing the new Torah scroll into the restored synagogue,” Engelmayer said: All those challenges led to “an increase of inner strength, of holding together, of answering to the crisis by much more Jewish life and being more active and more visible.”
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