Uncategorized
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.”
The post At soldiers’ graves, the rows keep growing: Israel’s Memorial Day is shaped by new loss appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Remembering Abe Foxman, the longtime ADL leader known as the ‘Jewish pope,’ who always answered my calls
Friday before sundown, I realized that Abe Foxman had not sent me his weekly “Shabbat Shalom” message. For the past seven years, since we began texting regularly about Jewish and political issues, the message would arrive each Friday like clockwork — often accompanied by screenshots of Shabbat memes. My response never changed: “Good Shabbos, tzaddik,” using the Hebrew word for a righteous person that Foxman himself often used.
A few minutes after sundown, I texted him anyway: “Good Shabbos, tzaddik.” Then I turned off my phone. The message showed as “read” Saturday night. But there was no response.
I’m sure I wasn’t the only one waiting for Foxman’s Shabbat greetings. The silence said everything. On Sunday, the Anti-Defamation League announced that its former longtime chief had died at age 86.
I first started texting with Foxman after he stepped down in 2015 as national director of the ADL, concluding a remarkable 50-year run with the organization, including nearly three decades at its helm. By then, he had become one of the most recognizable Jewish communal leaders in America. He was nicknamed the “Jewish Pope.” Former President Barack Obama, a frequent target of Foxman’s criticism over Israel policy, said upon Foxman’s retirement: “Abe is irreplaceable.”
For me, a rookie journalist covering national politics through a Jewish lens, Foxman became an invaluable source. He was in the room with presidents, prime ministers and world leaders during some of the Jewish community’s most consequential moments. Yet he was always available. He answered calls quickly. He texted back. He spoke candidly. He could be sharp, direct and deeply critical when he thought leaders were making mistakes. But he was also compassionate, warm and surprisingly personal.
Every conversation began the same way: asking about me. My kids. How I was holding up. Only then would we get to politics. The conversation would often veer from Yiddish to English and back again.
Our last conversation was on April 15, after a record 40 Senate Democrats voted to block $295 million for the transfer of bulldozers to Israel and 36 of them also supported a measure to block the sale of 1,000-pound bombs to the Jewish state. “A broch,” Foxman replied, using the Yiddish word for disaster. “A sad time for American politics.”
That worldview shaped much of his public commentary in recent years. In interviews with the Forward and other publications, Foxman weighed in on rising antisemitism, campus protests, Democratic divisions over Israel, President Donald Trump’s rhetoric, and the Biden-Netanyahu relationship.
Foxman could be combative and unapologetic. Critics on the left viewed him as too hawkish on Israel, while critics on the right sometimes accused him of being too willing to criticize the Israeli government or American conservatives. But nobody doubted his commitment to the Jewish people and to Israel.
Foxman’s own life story
Born in Baranavichy in 1940, in what is now Belarus, Foxman survived the Holocaust as an infant after being hidden by his Polish Catholic nanny, who baptized him to hide his Jewish identity, while his parents were confined to a ghetto. After the war, he was reunited with his parents, first living in a displaced persons camp in Austria before immigrating to the United States.
Those early experiences shaped the course of his career and ultimately made him one of the most influential Jewish communal leaders of the modern era.
In 1965, after getting degrees from City College of New York and New York University School of Law, Foxman joined the Anti-Defamation League as a legal assistant. Over the next five decades, Foxman rose through the ranks of the organization before being named its national director in 1987, a position he held until 2015.
Under his leadership, the ADL became one of the world’s most prominent voices combating antisemitism and hate.
In 1987, President Ronald Reagan appointed Foxman to serve on the council of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He was reappointed by Presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden. He was also vice chairman of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City.
Foxman was often willing to challenge leaders he believed were wrong on Israel, including Democratic presidents he otherwise respected. He was sharply critical of Obama’s approach toward Israel early in his presidency and became one of the leading Jewish voices opposing the administration’s 2009 demand for a freeze on Israeli settlements.
In remarks at Foxman’s farewell dinner in 2015, Susan Rice, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and national security advisor under Obama, told the audience: “The thing I most value about Abe is his candor and integrity. He holds everyone to the same high standards, and I can always count on him to tell it to me straight, even when he knows I won’t necessarily like what he has to say.” In 2020, Foxman publicly advocated for Biden to choose Rice as his vice-presidential running mate.
“America and the Jewish people have lost a moral voice, a passionate advocate for the Jewish people and the state of Israel, and a remarkable leader,” Foxman’s successor, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, said in a statement announcing Foxman’s death.
Foxman’s political commentary
Even after retiring from the ADL, Foxman remained a leading voice in Jewish public life, especially after the election of Trump in 2016.
Foxman told me in an interview at the time that the Jewish community should engage with Trump and hold him accountable when needed. He advised Trump to be cautious about making good on his promise to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He became more critical of Trump after the president said that there were “very fine people on both sides” in response to a 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
In 2020, Foxman broke his tradition of not endorsing political candidates to back Biden. He argued that Trump was a “demagogue” whose reelection would be a “body blow for our country and our community.”
Once Biden took office, Foxman started to express doubts about the president’s handling of the U.S. relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He said it “sends the wrong message to our friends and enemies” that Israel is being held to a higher standard than other countries in the region. Foxman was also a harsh critic of the Netanyahu government’s judicial overhaul, warning that the right-wing cabinet ministers could hamper support for Israel among American Jews.
In 2024, he warned that Biden’s increasingly harsh rhetoric over Israel’s military campaign in Gaza would repel Jewish voters. “I believe that this administration, because of its political season, is taking American Jews for granted or has written us off,” said Foxman. ”If they’re worried that the Arabs in Michigan will vote with their feet, they need to worry that Jews can also vote with their feet.”
Most recently, Foxman was critical of national Democrats opposing the military operations against the Iranian regime in March for a lack of congressional authority. “Sadly, it is purely political games,” Foxman told me, noting that previous Democratic administrations conducted military operations without explicit congressional authorization. “Ninety-nine percent of Democrats are on record saying Iran is a terrorist state and cannot have nuclear weapons. So why this game?” he asked.
Now, as Jews mark Jewish American Heritage Month, that voice is silent. But for me, and for the many people still waiting for one more “Shabbat Shalom” message from Foxman, he will not soon be forgotten.
Foxman is survived by his wife Golda, his daughters Michelle and Ariel and four grandchildren.
JTA contributed to this article.
The post Remembering Abe Foxman, the longtime ADL leader known as the ‘Jewish pope,’ who always answered my calls appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Jailed Iranian Peace Laureate Mohammadi Moved to Hospital in Tehran
A picture of Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi on the wall of the Grand Hotel in central Oslo before the Nobel banquet, in connection with the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize 2023, in Oslo, Norway, Dec. 10, 2023. Photo: NTB/Javad Parsa via REUTERS
Iran’s imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi has been moved to a hospital in the capital, Tehran, and has been granted a suspension of her sentence on heavy bail, a foundation run by her family said on Sunday.
Mohammadi, 54, won the prize in 2023 while in prison for a campaign to advance women’s rights and abolish the death penalty. She suffered a heart attack two weeks ago.
Her family had called for her to be transferred from Zanjan, northwest of Tehran, where she was serving her sentence and where she had been initially taken to a hospital, so that she could receive better medical care.
She is now at Tehran Pars Hospital for treatment by her own medical team after being transferred by ambulance, the Narges Mohammadi Foundation said in a statement.
Mohammadi was sentenced to a new prison term of 7-1/2 years, the foundation said in February, weeks before the US and Israel launched their war against Iran. The Nobel committee at the time called on Tehran to free her immediately.
She had been arrested in December after denouncing the death of a lawyer, Khosrow Alikordi. A prosecutor told reporters that she had made provocative remarks at Alikordi’s memorial ceremony.
The foundation gave no details of the bail arrangements or suspension of her sentence.
“However, a suspension is not enough,” it said. “Narges Mohammadi requires permanent, specialized care. We must ensure she never returns to prison.”
Iran shut down most of the internet in the country in January as authorities suppressed mass protests triggered by economic unease. Rights groups have reported ongoing executions of people involved in the unrest.
Uncategorized
Israel’s Attorney General Calls to Cancel Netanyahu’s Mossad Chief Appointment
Israeli Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara. Photo: Twitter
i24 News – Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara told the High Court of Justice on Sunday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to appoint Maj. Gen. Roman Gofman as the next Mossad chief must be canceled.
Baharav-Miara filed her position ahead of a Tuesday hearing on petitions challenging the appointment, telling the court that “substantial flaws” had been found both in the process conducted by the advisory committee and in the conclusions it drew. She said Netanyahu’s decision suffered from “extreme and blatant unreasonableness” and could not stand legally.
At the center of the dispute is the case of Ori Elmakayes, who was a 17-year-old minor when he was activated in 2022 by Division 210, without going through authorized intelligence channels. At the time, the division was commanded by Gofman. Elmakayes was arrested in May 2022 under espionage charges after two officers sent him classified information and told him to post it online as part of an “influence campaign,” despite not being authorized to do so. Gofman initiated this operation. Elmakayes was then held in full detention until July, spending an extended period under electronic monitoring and house arrest before the indictment against him was canceled in late 2023.
Baharav-Miara says Gofman’s involvement in leaking the classified information to the minor, “casts a heavy shadow on Gofman’s integrity and thus on his appointment to head the Mossad.” The attorney general also identified serious procedural failings in the advisory committee’s work. She notes that the majority members signed their opinion before committee chairman and former Supreme Court president Asher Grunis had written his dissent and before two members had reviewed several classified documents significant to the full picture. Grunis concluded that integrity flaws had been found and that it was not appropriate to appoint Gofman as Mossad chief.
The attorney general also says the committee failed to hear directly from Elmakayes or from a relevant senior military intelligence officer, instead relying in part on media interviews.
Netanyahu, who appointed Gofman to head the Mossad starting in early June, for a five-year term, submitted his own response to the court on this past Friday, arguing that the decision fell within his executive authority. The Prime Minister also said that his assessment of the matter was “dozens of times superior” to that of the court, adding that Gofman’s integrity was “found pure,” and describing him as the most qualified candidate.
Other coalition figures responded to the attorney general with sharp criticism, including National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. Ben-Gvir accused Baharav-Miara of fighting the state, while Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said her position was “one step too far” and vowed to advance legislation splitting the attorney general’s role in the Knesset’s summer session.