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At this unique yearlong Torah study program in Jerusalem, students are encouraged to ask ‘Why?’
JERUSALEM — Walk the streets of Jerusalem on any given weekday morning, and you will discover there’s no shortage of intensive Torah study in this city that symbolizes the beating heart of the Jewish people.
Yet among the many yeshivas and seminaries it’s rare to find a beit midrash, or Jewish study hall, marked both by a commitment to egalitarian values and serious Torah study — not to mention one where Jews of color, LGBTQ+ Jews, converts, and Jews from marginalized groups are integral to the community.
The Conservative Yeshiva, which is part of the Fuchsberg Jerusalem Center, threads that unique needle: It is a place in central Jerusalem where leaders and seekers from all backgrounds come to deepen their Jewish scholarship and find their place in Jewish tradition.
“Students come here with a sense of intellectual integrity and honesty to engage with traditional texts,” said Liz M.K. Nelson, a former kollel student from the yeshiva originally from Detroit who is now the yeshiva’s recruiter. “They come here on their individual journeys, with their different approaches to Judaism, with a real sense of determination to pursue their individual spiritual goals in an intentional community.”
Even when it comes to Jewish texts that challenge their views and values, Nelson said, “Here they can grapple with them in a space where everyone is dedicated to working through them with a sense of commitment to tradition, community, and integrity.”
The Conservative Yeshiva offers a range of programs, from summer experiences to winter break learning programs to partnerships that can lead to a master’s degree in Jewish education or even the rabbinate.
But the flagships of the institution are its long-term learning programs.
Called Lishma — a Hebrew term that means doing or learning for its own sake — the program welcomes post-college students of any age. The Lishma program is currently accepting applicants for the fall; it is open to both full-time and part-time students.
Students from the Lishma and Advanced Halakhah programs eat with faculty at a weekly community lunch. (Jonny Finkel)
Orah Liss, a native of Frankfurt, Germany, who was raised in a Masorti home (the equivalent of Conservative Judaism outside of North America), came to Lishma after completing a Jewish studies program in Sweden focused on Jewish literature, history and philosophy. Liss, 26, was looking to learn more from and about traditional Jewish texts.
“I wanted to build the familiarity with it — not just the what, but the why. I wanted to read the Talmud and have an understanding of it,” Liss said. “For me the halacha is very important, as is the traditional prayer service, so I wanted a place with the traditional aspects along with egalitarianism.”
The generous spirit of the yeshiva community became evident when Liss was saying Kaddish for her grandmother, she said. Even on days when there were no scheduled prayer services, she said, “I asked for people to come for a minyan and on every day people showed up.”
Some students use the year at Lishma as a stepping-stone to rabbinical school. A new track called Omek (Hebrew for “depth”) offers specialization in areas that expands students’ Jewish literacy and breadth of spiritual knowledge on the pathway to becoming a rabbi at one of the seminaries with which the Yeshiva works — such as the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies in Los Angeles.
The focus isn’t just Jewish study, but also community building, immersion in authentic Jewish living and even innovation in worship.
Devorah Gillard, 66, a Lishma student from Nova Scotia, Canada, said she came to the Conservative Yeshiva at the Fuchsberg Jerusalem Center to learn Torah in an open environment.
“The Conservative Yeshiva encourages you to ask and explore and expand. You are not judged. They hear what you have to say — your doubts and fears —and they help you to grow,” she said.
Raised as an evangelical Christian, Gillard’s lifelong spiritual journey led her to convert to Judaism eight years ago. She’s now a board member of the Canadian Foundation for Masorti Judaism in Toronto. “I wanted to understand what it meant to be Jewish, to get to the depth of Torah,” Gillard said.
Ejnat Willing discusses the Talmud in a class at the yeshiva in the Fuchsberg Jerusalem Center. (Jonny Finkel)
She said her fellow students have a zeal to engage with Judaism and do good in the world that’s infectious.
“These are people who are really serious about their religion and God and don’t just daven,” or pray, Gillard said. “They are more aware of the environment, food insecurity and inclusion. They go after what they want to do in this world.”
The Lishma program draws some 30 students a year to its Jerusalem campus from near and far. They study Talmud, Tanakh, and Midrash as well as Jewish philosophy and prayer in a way that seeks to accommodate modern scholarship and the contemporary world. Students come from all kinds of levels of Jewish knowledge and Hebrew proficiency; the Fuchsberg Jerusalem Center offers supporting programs to bring people up to speed as needed.
Allan Fis-Calderon spent most of his 20s advancing his career as a movie scriptwriter in Mexico City. But when the Covid-19 pandemic shut the world down, Fis-Calderon, 30, began to revisit his desire to study Torah. His rabbi from the city’s egalitarian Beit El Masorti synagogue suggested he look into the Conservative Yeshiva.
“So far this has been the best experience in my life — to experience Judaism from a liberal place where they take me into account. I feel at home and part of the group,” he said. “This has given me the opportunity to study Torah and develop myself as a Jew.”
Being in Israel at this crucial moment, where it feels like society is deeply divided, has made him appreciate Israel even more, Fis-Calderon said.
Much of the learning is conducted using the traditional Jewish method of chevruta, where students learn in pairs, but there is also plenty of classroom time with teachers.
Rabbi Joel Levy, the rosh yeshiva (yeshiva head), said his goal is to move every student along on their own journey of Jewish discovery.
“This is an immersive environment but not a coercive one. People need space and time to work out their relationship with Judaism and literacy,” Levy said. “Some people will come out of the other end saying they want to keep Shabbat and others will not keep Shabbat. I consider it a success when that decision has been made as an informed adult.”
Levy’s job, he said, is to create a space where people can take their own search seriously and openly.
The students who come to the Conservative Yeshiva hail from a range of Jewish denominations, races, ages, sexual orientations and gender identities. Though each may be in their own place in their individual religious journey, they learn and experience Jerusalem and Israel together as members of a Jewish community, he said.
“It is a total privilege to be with a group of people who are thinking about and searching for how to translate the wisdom and value of our tradition to today’s beautifully complex world,” Levy said.
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A Democratic upset in Connecticut — but Israel was not a factor
(JTA) — Luke Bronin scored a decisive victory over longtime Rep. John Larson in Connecticut’s Democratic primary Tuesday, marking another defeat for AIPAC which had backed the 14-term congressman.
The pro-Israel lobby group is increasingly viewed as politically toxic in Democratic primaries across the country, with several progressive candidates notching victories after making opposition to the group a centerpiece of their campaigns.
Israel and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, however, were not at the forefront of the contest in Connecticut’s 1st Congressional District, reflecting a more nuanced picture regarding Democratic voters’ shifting sentiments toward Israel.
Bronin and Larson, the race’s two candidates with more traditionally pro-Israel positions, together won nearly 90% of the vote, with Bronin receiving 53% while Larson received 34%. The two progressive candidates in the race, Jillian Gilchrest and Ruth Fortune, who both accused Israel of genocide in Gaza, finished a distant third and fourth.
Bronin, 46, who has Jewish ancestry on his father’s side, is the former mayor of Hartford and also served in the Obama Administration as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes. His campaign largely centered on affordability and emphasizing the need for new leadership in the Democratic party.
“If we are going to fix this mess that we are in, we need to build a Democratic Party that is bringing a whole new energy to this fight,” Bronin told supporters following his victory.
Israel was not entirely absent from the campaign. Larson, who first took office in 1999, split with Bronin during a primary debate last month when Larson defended his recent vote in support of U.S. military aid to Israel.
“Yes, I voted in favor of making sure that Israel, our ally, is going to get the aid from the United States that it needs. But the Palestinians need humanitarian aid, and Donald Trump has got to enforce the law,” Larson said.
Bronin pushed back at Larson, replying, “Trusting Donald Trump to do the right thing is a mind-blowing example of putting hope over all of the evidence in front of us.”
While Larson had long supported Israel during his tenure in Congress, he has been critical of Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza and treatment of Palestinians and vocally opposed the United States’ war in Iran.
Bronin, meanwhile, has said he is against taxpayer money going toward funding offensive military aid to Israel, though he supports “defenses for civilians that protect civilian life against rockets and missiles and drones.”
“I think it’s hugely important that Israel exists as a safe, secure homeland for the Jewish people,” Bronin said when asked about his views on Israel on The Lisa Wexler Show in May. He also spoke out against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, explaining that the premier had “done enormous damage to Israel’s security, Israel’s standing in the world,” adding that “we have an obligation as a country to say what’s happening is not okay.”
Bronin slightly outraised Larson on the campaign trail, receiving roughly $3.1 million largely from individual donations from billionaires and large firms, while Larson received $2.7 million and relied more on donations from PACs, according to the Federal Election Commission.
Larson received roughly $120,000 in AIPAC-linked donations during the campaign cycle, according to the campaign finance database Open Secrets.
Bronin will now face Republican Amy Chai, a physician and mental health advocate, in the general election for the state’s first congressional district. The district, which spans Bristol, Hartford and Torrington, is home to 27,800 Jews, representing 3.9% of the total population, according to the Berman Jewish Data Bank.
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Jack Ukeles, who used data and idealism to shape Jewish communal life, dies at 89
(JTA) — Throughout a storied career of more than five decades that included key roles in teaching courses at elite universities, policy planning for city and state governments and community surveys for Jewish organizations around the world, Jack Ukeles had one consistent goal: to blend research, data and strategic problem-solving with idealism in making the world a better place.
Ukeles, who died July in Jerusalem at the age of 89, was widely and deeply admired as well for his integrity, wisdom and compassion on both a personal and professional level.
He was also one of the most prominent members of a cohort of Jewish social scientists who, from the 1980s through the 2000s, played a central role in setting the agenda for organized Jewish life. Philanthropists and nonprofit leaders sought their data and recommendations on hot-button issues like rising intermarriage, attachment to Israel, population trends and declining engagement with Jewish institutions.
In 1981, Ukeles joined the Jewish non-profit world as senior planning officer of the New York Federation of Jewish Philanthropies (now UJA-Federation of New York). He led the charity’s first scientific study of the New York area’s Jewish population, and major studies on senior services and Jewish poverty.
Five years later, he went out on his own, launching Ukeles Associates, Inc., and for 28 years led consulting projects combining his experience in policy research, planning and management for a range of secular and Jewish non-profits.
Speaking at the funeral in Jerusalem, where Ukeles and his wife, Mierle, lived since making aliyah in 2012, longtime friend and colleague Asher Ostrin predicted that Ukeles’s teaching, in both classrooms and nonprofit board rooms, will have a lasting effect, especially for American Jewry.
“Generations of Jewish communal professionals are his students, and are taught to reflect the method and values he held dear,” said Ostrin, an executive at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
Those values were shaped growing up in a religious Zionist home, aware of the trauma his parents endured in Eastern Europe before settling in New York. Ukeles’s mother wanted a first-rate Jewish education for her only son, and after visiting a number of yeshivas, moved the family from The Bronx to Brooklyn so he could attend the Yeshiva of Flatbush, where he thrived academically and as student council president and member of the basketball team.
After seeing a newspaper ad announcing the opening of a university in Israel committed to integrating modern scholarship and traditional Jewish learning, he applied and was accepted in 1955 to Bar-Ilan University’s first class.
“My father was proud to be a member of that first class, and as a student leader there, he wanted to help build the school and be a part of its growth” in synthesizing secular and religious studies, his daughter Raquel Ukeles recalled. “But the administration wasn’t interested.” He was 18 at the time.
After a year in Israel, Ukeles attended a yeshiva and Brooklyn College, where he took courses in community planning, research and data. He received his B.A. in political science in 1959, and an M.A. in city planning two years later at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1962, Ukeles spent a year in New Delhi, India, as a Fulbright Fellow and returned to complete his Ph.D. at Penn in 1971.
During his graduate school years, Ukeles turned a summer job in the New York City planning department into a three-year position. He helped produce the first data-driven analysis of New York City’s housing needs, and was part of a team that reshaped the city’s approach to urban renewal.
He then turned to academia, starting a long-term pattern of moving back and forth between university posts — including the New School, where he later became chairman of the first urban policy graduate program in the U.S. — and designing and leading civil service and financial reforms in New York through the mayor’s office under Abe Beame and Ed Koch.
On behalf of Jewish organizations, he conducted a 2006 survey of Atlanta’s Jewish population that confirmed the explosive growth of Jewish communities in the Sun Belt, and co-authored a 2002 community study showing how Russian immigrants and Orthodox Jews were changing the face of New York City Jewry.
Ukeles was he co-authopr of a 2012 study showing that New York City area’s Jewish population was on the rise again, thanks largely to the growth of Orthodox households.(Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
In 2009, he wrote a report on how nonprofits can turn the severe economic downturn into opportunity. Drawing on his experience in city management, he advised nonprofits neither to panic nor deny the reality of squeezed budgets.
“You can forget about strategy if you do not have courage, if you do not have big ideas, or if you do not have vision, and most importantly, if you do not have compassion,” he said in a lecture that year drawing on the report. “In fact, without the ‘right stuff,’ you are in the wrong line of work.”
Family members noted that the common thread in Ukeles’s career in academia, city government and non-profits was to deal with difficult problems by making decisions based on real data, not theoretical ideas, and to bring the stakeholders around the table to make the best — or sometimes least worst — decisions based on need and priority.
Elie Kaunfer, CEO and president of the Hadar Institute, a center of Jewish life and learning, said that when Ukeles conducted the first formal evaluation of the organization in 2011, “he taught me so much about what kind of questions to ask — not just about experience of the program but ultimate impact on people’s lives.”
John Ruskay, former CEO of UJA-Federation, described him as “a loyal friend and dear colleague who I and so many others turned to repeatedly for counsel, for wisdom, for ‘chizuk’” (inner strength).
Sometimes his counsel came with critique. Steve Bayme, a former American Jewish Committee executive and longtime Ukeles friend, noted: “Jack knew how to offer constructive criticism and even occasional rebuke in ways that colleagues, including those in senior communal positions, could hear and absorb.”
Alan Gill, who served as CEO of the JDC, praised Ukeles for “his expertise in challenging and guiding us.” He said Ukeles “yelled at us” once, which was unheard of from consultants who tended to be dispassionate and analytical, he noted. But the outburst had “a positive effect,” Gill added, reminding JDC staff how much “the mission and work mattered” to Ukeles.
That sense of heartfelt criticism also applied to Ukeles’s devotion to, and frustration with, the state of Israel in recent years. He agonized over the growth of extremism in the haredi Orthodox community and Jewish settler violence, and he spoke out in pieces he published in The Times of Israel.
“Jack loved the Jewish people,” said Sally Gottesman, who was hired by Ukeles as a young consultant in 1997. Now an activist-philanthropist focused on gender and justice in the Jewish community, Gottesman said Ukeles was “a mentor and master teacher” and praised his efforts to promote equality for women.
A prime example was his support for and great pride in the accomplishments of his wife, Mierle, who in seeking to blend art with waste management became the official artist-in-residence of the NYC Department of Sanitation, a volunteer position she has held since 1977. Her unique career was the focus of an award-winning 2025 documentary, “Maintenance Artist.”
“Jack was my heart and soul,” she said. “His support, championing my being a free artist and a full person, all through the years, extending as well to his supporting the work of many other women artists of our time, was without a peer, without an end.”
In addition to his wife, Ukuleles is survived by his daughters, Raquel, who is head of collections at the National Library of Israel, and Yael, a product market manager and founder of two non-profit Israeli environmental education programs, and a son, Meir, who works with an Israel-based VC fund investing in startups.
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A pair of Jewish businessmen gave the Lakers their name. Now another Jewish duo is buying the team.
Back when the National Basketball Association was little more than a startup, two Jewish businessmen named Benjamin Berger and Morris Chalfen bought the worst team in the sport, the Detroit Gems, for $15,000. They relocated the franchise to Minneapolis and gave it a name that nodded to state geography.
Eighty years later, the Lakers are a global brand, have won 17 championships and play in Los Angeles — and for the first time since Berger and Chalfen sold, a Jewish duo will take the reins. Joshua Kushner and Bob Iger are buying a majority stake in the team, ESPN reported Wednesday. They’ll be paying a tad more than Berger did in the 1940s —the Lakers were valued at $12.5 billion in the sale.
It’s been a busy summer for Kushner, a real estate scion married to supermodel Karlie Kloss; his brother Jared is a former Trump administration fixture. A company backed by his VC firm, Thrive Capital, tried to buy a stake in the World Cup last month, causing an international backlash that may yet lead to the resignation of FIFA president Gianni Infantino. (That subsidiary, Thrive Eternal, also owns a stake in the San Francisco Giants.)
Kushner and Iger were reportedly angling to buy an expansion NBA franchise in Las Vegas before pivoting to the Lakers.
“As lifelong NBA fans, we are deeply honored for the opportunity to become stewards of the Los Angeles Lakers, one of the most iconic sports franchises in the world,” Kushner and Iger said in a statement to ESPN.
Kushner is now tasked with restoring the Lakers to “Showtime” glory — perhaps with Kloss courtside in the seat once held by an earlier model-turned-owner, Jeanie Buss.
He comes from a family well-acquainted with the tabloids. His brother, Jared, is married to Ivanka Trump and serves as a White House advisor. Their father, Charles Kushner, made billions in real estate development before he was sent to prison for illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion and witness tampering. (Trump later pardoned him, and today Kushner serves as the U.S. ambassador to France.)
The sale comes 14 months after Buss sold the Lakers to Mark Walter, the head of a private equity firm and a co-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Walter, who bought the team at a $10 billion valuation, is currently facing federal and SEC investigations into insurance companies tied to his broader business operations.
It was not publicly known that the Lakers were for sale, and ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne reported Wednesday that Kushner and Iger — who had previously been bidding for an expansion NBA team in Las Vegas — approached Walter with an offer he couldn’t refuse.
The sale would make the Lakers the 14th NBA team out of 30 with Jewish principal owners. The league was founded by Jewish businessmen in the 1940s.
The newcomers will inherit a roster in transition following the departure of LeBron James, who at 41 is a few months older than Kushner, the youngest majority owner in the NBA.
Behind James and Luka Dončić, the Lakers finished with the fourth-best record in the Western Conference last season and were eliminated in the second round of the playoffs. James signed with the Philadelphia 76ers this offseason in free agency.
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