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Berlin rabbi makes history as first European to head Conservative rabbis’ association
(JTA) — BERLIN — Gesa Shira Ederberg was not yet a rabbi when she was tapped to lead a seder, to teach Hebrew, and to organize an egalitarian minyan in her home city of Berlin. She happened to be in the right places when help was needed, recalls Ederberg, who was pursuing a degree in Jewish studies at the time. She wondered: Could she be doing more?
Three decades later, Ederberg is a veteran rabbi of Berlin’s first official egalitarian congregation on Oranienburger Strasse — and this month she reached a new milestone.
She was installed last week as the international head of the Conservative/Masorti movement’s Rabbinical Assembly, the organization representing more than 1,600 rabbis worldwide. For the first time, the group is being led by a European rabbi.
Her installation marks another milestone as well. “As far as the Rabbinical Assembly is aware — Rabbi Ederberg is the first Jew by choice to serve as president,” said a spokesperson for the organization.
For observers of Jewish life in Germany, the moment carries symbolic weight.
“This is quite an extraordinary deal, actually, because there’s never been a non-American or non-Israeli to head the Rabbinical Assembly,” said Deidre Berger, an American who has lived in Germany for more than 40 years and serves on the boards of both the German and worldwide Masorti organizations.
“It’s also a major step forward in relations between a broader group in the American Jewish community with Germany — with being willing to acknowledge that postwar Jewish life did get relaunched in Germany and is here to stay,” added Berger, the former head of the American Jewish Committee office in Berlin.
Rabbi Jacob Blumenthal, CEO of both the Rabbinical Assembly and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, said Ederberg’s election also reflects the movement’s embrace of Jews by choice.
“Welcoming converts is one of the ways in which our communities are growing and thriving,” he said. “So to have a colleague who made this choice to lead a Jewish life and then to become a rabbi is certainly something to celebrate.”
Ederberg’s installation took place in two parts: last week at Congregation Beth Sholom in Teaneck, New Jersey, followed by a second ceremony on Tuesday in Berlin, where her synagogue received a Rabbinical Assembly Torah mantle that remains with each president during their term.
“I will see it every time we open the ark,” she said. “It will be a reminder of my new responsibilities.”
Born in 1968 in the German city of Tuebingen, Ederberg grew up in a Lutheran family. Her father was in charge of his church’ youth exchanges with Israel, and Israeli teenagers often visited the family home. She traveled to Israel for the first time at age 13, an experience that helped cement what she said was “a deep connection” with the country and its people.
Ederberg later earned a master’s degree in Protestant theology. But her involvement in Jewish-Christian dialogue deepened her interest in Judaism, leading her to pursue Jewish studies in Berlin and eventually convert in 1995 at the Jewish Theological Seminary there.
Her decision grew partly out of her fascination with Jewish texts. “I was loving the texts,” she recalled early in her rabbinic career.
But it was also theological. She had come to believe that “the anti-Jewish tradition was an intrinsic part of Christianity,” she said at the time, and rejected interpretations portraying Judaism as obsolete.
Conversion, she added, was “a long and difficult process. You only get there if you really want it.”
Ederberg was ordained in 2002 at the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. Her husband, Nils Ederberg — whom she met when both were Protestant students of Jewish studies — is also a rabbi. Ordained at Berlin’s Abraham Geiger College in 2014, he now serves as a military chaplain in Hamburg. The couple has three children.
After serving her first pulpit in Weiden, Ederberg returned to Berlin in 2007. There she became the first woman to serve as a rabbi in the city since Regina Jonas, a Liberal rabbi ordained in 1935 who was murdered by the Nazis, and only the second woman to hold a synagogue pulpit since the Holocaust.
She has helped build institutions for Germany’s small Masorti movement, founding Berlin’s Masorti elementary school in 2018 and serving as a founding member of Germany’s General Rabbinical Conference for non-Orthodox rabbis. She also served as a rabbinic adviser to the Zacharias Frankel College Conservative seminary at the University of Potsdam.
At the same time, she rose through the leadership ranks of the Rabbinical Assembly, serving in several voluntary roles before being elected vice president two years ago. She was elected president in December, succeeding Rabbi Jay Kornsgold of New Jersey, becoming the third woman to hold the role.
Ederberg’s installation comes at a challenging time for what was once America’s largest Jewish denomination, but has for years faced declining membership. As a centrist movement committed to what has been called “tradition and change,” it sits between a growing Orthodoxy on one side and a liberal Reform movement that has historically been far swifter to innovate.
Her installation also comes as broader changes in attitudes toward Jewish life in Germany have shifted. For decades after World War II, many American Jewish institutions viewed Germany as an unlikely place for Jewish communal revival.
Ederberg’s mentor, Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, the former chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America who encouraged her to pursue ordination, described her as “both the agent and the symbol of the potential of Conservative Judaism to flourish once again in Germany.”
That revival has taken place alongside a transformation of Germany’s Jewish population. Before World War II, about 500,000 Jews lived in the country. After the Holocaust only a small community remained, but immigration from the former Soviet Union beginning in the late 1990s helped rebuild Jewish life. Today roughly 100,000 Jews belong to congregations in Germany, with a similar number unaffiliated.
There are currently two Masorti congregations in the country: Ederberg’s in Berlin and another in Cologne.
Her congregation meets upstairs in a chapel attached to the New Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse in former East Berlin. The mid-19th-century building was heavily damaged during World War II; its windows overlook the empty courtyard that once held the synagogue’s Torah ark and pews. Today, congregants gather in restored spaces, including a hall above what once served as the women’s gallery.
While other synagogues now offer egalitarian services, Ederberg’s congregation once served as an incubator, giving many women their first opportunity to read Torah from the bimah.
“On the one hand, it’s an intimate setting in her synagogue,” Blumenthal said. “But also you see the depth of both knowledge and commitment of the folks who are part of her community.”
Ederberg knows that for some people, her German Christian background remains a hurdle. Jewish identity in Germany today often reflects complicated family histories shaped by the upheavals of the 20th century.
Not only are there numerous converts like herself; there also are many Jews with a mother or grandmother who survived the Holocaust and a father or grandfather who served in the Wehrmacht, she noted. The question of Jewish identity in Germany, Ederberg said, “is a broader question about individuals and their family history.”
Her own family history reflects that complexity: Both of her grandfathers served in World War II, one dying at Stalingrad and the other working as a mechanic.
Ultimately, she said, the mentorship she received from three German-born Jewish figures — Schorsch as well as Israeli educators Alice Shalvi and Zeev Falk — proved decisive.
Back when she was an accidental rabbi, called upon to lead seders and services and to teach in a pinch, Ederberg hadn’t made up her mind whether to pursue ordination. She might have chosen to become a diplomat, she says, if it had not been for those three mentors who took her by the hand.
“Their encouragement, their push towards rabbinical school, their push towards, ‘Yes, you should go back to Germany and do what you’re doing,’ was really crucial,” she said.
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The definitive Oct. 7 book was written — and sketched — before the attack
As Salomé Parent-Rachdi and Zac Deloupy worked on the drawings for a book about Israeli-Palestinian romance, they had no way of knowing the world they were depicting was on the brink of collapse.
The day they finished their pencil sketches, we learn in the book’s introduction, was Oct. 6, 2023. The next day, Hamas invaded Israel, killing about 1,200 and taking another 251 hostage. By the time the book was published in April 2024, Israel was locked in a multi-front war that still hasn’t quite settled.
That context — a looming attack, a forever war that has not yet begun — colors every panel of Love and Desire in the Promised Land: The Private Lives of Israelis and Palestinians, a French graphic nonfiction book whose English translation was released this summer. Reading the book feels like opening a time capsule that had been buried in the distant past: Even as it reminds you how bad the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was before Oct. 7, it leaves you wishing desperately you could restore things to how they were.
The book follows Parent-Rachdi, a French journalist, as she travels across Israel and the Palestinian territories to interview 16 subjects about their love lives. She talks to a mix of singles and couples, straight and gay, in Israel, West Bank and Gaza. (That’s one giveaway this book couldn’t have been made today: No journalist has been permitted to enter Gaza unaccompanied since Oct. 7.)
A few tell of dating across Palestinian-Israeli lines. Lana, an Arab Israeli, finds herself in a situationship with a right-wing Israeli — and ends up marrying him. Samira, an Arab Israeli woman, tells us about her Israeli ex, whose enlistment during the 2014 Gaza war — when they are living together — brings the unspoken tension in their relationship out into the open. And we learn the complex family dynamics of a celebrity Muslim-Jewish couple: Fauda star Tsahi Halevi and his Arab-Israeli wife, TV anchor Lucy Aharish.
The less politically fraught experiences are relayed with the same empathy. Avi, an ex-Hasid, reveals that, despite unbearable teenage horniness, he initially didn’t know how to find porn on the internet due to his insular upbringing. (He searches for “woman in pajamas” instead.) Rami, Parent-Rachdi’s fixer and taxi driver in Gaza, says, as a single man in his thirties, he told people he had erectile dysfunction so they wouldn’t grow suspicious.
In between these revelations are glimpses of life as it was in Israel and the Palestinian territories before Oct. 7. We ride shotgun as Parent-Rachdi navigates checkpoints on her way out of the West Bank and deals with Israeli and Palestinian officials on the way into Gaza. Rami — who did finally marry — says he made sure his son was born in Jordan so that he wouldn’t be trapped in Gaza as an adult. Parent-Rachdi has brought his stepson a remote-control car — the kind of toy Rami can’t buy in Gaza due to the Israeli blockade.
The love stories describe conflict, of course, and they do not uniformly lead to happy endings. (Or for that matter, breakups.) What they consistently show instead is people — as far as we can tell, basically good people — reaching out to each other in a pressure cooker of cultural, religious, sexual and political attitudes.
The stories also betray civilians’ genuine skepticism of their own communities with a frankness that seems unimaginable today. The clearest example of this comes in Gaza, where Mohammed, a closeted Palestinian looking for hookups, tells Parent-Rachdi about Hamas honor killings of gay men and his own brush with death. “They’re more likely to kill you if you’re a bottom,” he says matter-of-factly. Catfished by a Hamas intelligence officer, Mohammed escapes arrest by swearing he’s a virgin and flees to the U.S. a few days later.
Would Mohammed make the same disclosures today, when “What about Hamas?” has become a refrain for anyone defending Israel’s response to Oct. 7? The Gaza he left behind no longer exists. The book’s afterword, written in Feb. 2024, reveals that Rami’s wife’s cosmetics store — lovingly illustrated by Deloupy earlier in the book — was leveled in Israeli airstrikes; the family was now living in a refugee camp in Rafah. “We have gone from a life with all the modern comforts to a reality where we move with a cart, where we buy wood to split and burn in order to cook and take a shower,” he says.
As for Mohammed, his house was destroyed, as were many friendships with Jews and Israelis: “I write to them,” he says in the afterword. “They don’t respond, but they read my message.” As for Hamas, he says, “today, seeing the suffering, somehow I feel like I better understand their resistance.” When the authors checked in with the subjects, several did not respond. By then, some 30,000 Palestinians were dead.
As it reminds us what we’ve lost, Love and Desire in the Promised Land also points the only way toward a shared future: people on all sides defying the forces pulling them apart. It shows us it can be done. Even in the afterword, one of the interviewees, a Modern Orthodox Jew named Jean-Marc, is optimistic: “I am still convinced, even more so now, that we have to work with the Palestinians,” he says. “Our safety depends on it.”
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Christian leaders are racing toward the Rapture. Is Israel really to blame?
End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World
By Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 384 pages, $32
Judaism is not usually a religion associated with apocalyptic thought. There’s no Jewish version of the Book of Revelation. There is a concept of a Messianic Age, but most observant groups forbid interfering with — encouraging or discouraging — its arrival.
Yet Judaism, or at least Israel, is central to Christian apocalyptic thought. The lines that drive its connection to Israel are well-traced. The Book of Revelation requires Jews to return to the promised land, and a Third Temple to be built for Jesus to return, and so, for years, Christian Zionists like John Hagee, the founder of Christians United for Israel and Mike Huckabee, the current U.S. ambassador to Israel, have encouraged wars in the region, seeing them as part of prophecy.
Hagee and Huckabee have talked in glowing terms of the many lands they believe comprise “greater Israel” all becoming part of the modern nationstate, in fulfillment of biblical requirements for the Rapture. Byron Stinson, another wealthy evangelical leader, has worked to breed and import blemish-free red heifers to Israel, because their ashes are necessary to build the Third Temple that will herald the return of Jesus.
More recently, the Jewish extremists who are also hungry to build a Third Temple have moved from the fringe into the Israeli government. Several times now, Israeli security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has stalked around the Temple Mount, where Jews are officially forbidden from prayer, and led a large group in prayer, flanked by the police force he heads. Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s minister of finance, has promised to fund the construction of a Third Temple.
But as powerful as these Jewish leaders are, the Christians are far bigger. CUFI, the group led by Hagee, is the biggest Zionist group in the U.S., far larger than AIPAC.
And yet End Times Fascism, a new book from activists and writers Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor — Klein is known for books like No Logo and Shock Doctrine, where she coined the relevant term “disaster capitalism” — focuses largely on Israel, and the extremists in its government.
The book’s central argument is that accelerationist fanatics believe an apocalyptic future will benefit them — whether in heaven or on earth. And they’re racing toward that future with increasingly fascistic terms.
These apocalyptic futures vary. For Christians, it might be the Rapture, and ultimately heaven. For AI techies, it’s a world ruled by the silicone grip of an all-knowing machine — or at least a world ruled by the superrich and filled with AI-driven propaganda masquerading as the voice of God while it surveils its users. For ethno-nationalists, it’s a homogenous country in which they can live out their nostalgia for an imagined perfect past. End Times Fascism is divided into sections, each taking on one of these groups and its ravenous vision for the end of the world, and how it is leading the world into fascism — through moral policing, surveillance, xenophobia.
But in the section on religious extremism, Israeli extremists get at least as much airtime as the Christians, despite the fact that these end time fanatics have far less global influence and don’t represent the vast majority of Jews.
It is, of course, important to understand the interplay between Christian apocalyptic thought and Judaism, and this is where things can get tangled. Christian Zionists’ desire for the Rapture leads them to support Israel and, sometimes, to display a kind of philosemitism. Ultimately, they are neither true friends to the Jews nor supporters of Israel; Hagee once gave a sermon claiming God sent Hitler as a kind of shepherd to force Jews back to Israel, in alignment with the biblical plan — when, of course, Jews will convert or burn in hell. But these beliefs have not made most Jewish groups cut ties with CUFI; Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has, for decades, referred to U.S. Christian Zionists, and Hagee in particular, as beloved supporters of Israel, and has said that Christian Zionists made Jewish Zionism possible. Many Jews are similarly grateful for evangelical support of Israel, regardless of what less supportive beliefs might undergird it, and are willing to ally with these religious extremists if it means support for Israel’s wars and annexations.
Certainly, all of these thoughts build on one another, and are difficult to untangle; plenty of hawkish Jews and Israelis want Israel to expand for non-biblical reasons. But the vast majority of Jews are not actively working to build a Third Temple and bring about the end of the world as we know it. Yet Klein and Taylor represent Jews largely through extremists like Ben-Gvir, and even focus their discussion of Christian apocalyptic thought on its overlap with Judaism and Israel. These religions share the Hebrew Bible, but little else.
There is far more to Christian apocalyptic thought than Israel. Plenty of Rapture-hopefuls in the U.S. believe their own country is the promised land; indeed, theological power is shifting away from Israel, as a new cohort of Christian extremists like Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson catch hold of the political discourse and steer it toward open antisemitism and harsh scrutiny of U.S. support of Israel.
The old guard is being replaced by a new Christian right that is suspicious of Israel’s every action, and doesn’t egg on its wars. When Tucker Carlson interviewed Ted Cruz, a staunch supporter of Israel, the senator explained the Christian theological grounding of his support for Israel; Carlson, also a loudly devout Christian, jeered.
That’s not to say, of course, that there aren’t still many Christian Zionists in power in the U.S., shaping its foreign policy regarding Israel. But End Times Fascism feels as though it is stuck in a previous era of American Christianity, and of U.S. politics.
This problem is not limited to the section on religious apocalypse. The second part of the book, focused on the AI hunger of transhumanist tech titans, spends time on neoreactionary thinker Curtis Yarvin’s plan for a New Gaza, as it was presented at a Peter Thiel conference. Thiel is, himself, a Christian who is famously obsessed with the antichrist and the end of the world — once again, there is crossover, and these topics all share threads. But Israel is not the major driver of the race toward AI killing us all, or any other tech-related doom.
The fundamental idea of Klein and Taylor’s work is that rapturous obsessions drive not only worldly destruction — that much seems obvious — but also fascism. It’s a smart idea, and they have plenty of examples, whether surveillance by our internet overlords or ICE raids pushed for by white nationalists. But the book spends so much time on its trendiest target — Israel — when it should direct its energy examining figures like U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the muscular Christianity driving his new testosterone regime for the U.S. military, or influential online figures like Owens or Fuentes agitating for a white, Christian U.S. (Some of these influencers are mentioned, but not as primary drivers.)
Certainly, Israel is involved in U.S. politics, in Christian nationalism, in the building of an ethnostate. (Israel in fact appears least in the third section on ethnonationalism, which is surprising given its identity as a Jewish state.) But despite Israel’s importance, the U.S., and its leaders, are still far more powerful.
The issue might be the book’s structure. The idea that apocalyptic thought drives fascism is a fairly simple one, and many of Klein and Taylor’s examples are familiar. The idea that is more subtle, and harder to grasp, is the way the threads of eschatological thought, ethnonationalism and tech wealth all share ideas and shape each other.
Peter Thiel alone, given his tech companies, his antichrist obsession, his love of Nazi theorists and his influence over Vice President JD Vance, could generate at least a chapter in any of the book’s three sections, or serve as a throughline for the entire book. Yet the topics are divided, as though each form of apocalyptic thought is its own entity, instead of woven together to show the ways they all reinforce each other.
End Times Fascism closes with a section on how to fight the rising fascism. Perhaps this should be the main focus of the book; many people who read the news already feels as though our leaders are racing toward the apocalypse, or at least WW III and a second Great Depression. The real question is what to do.
End Times Fascism offers some inspirations, including New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, as well as the Jewish Labor Bund. At least if the focus is once again on Jews, this time it’s positive.
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Why Dolly Parton sang a song about a Jewish journalist
A Broadway show, a star-studded television tribute, a new hotel and museum in Nashville. As odes to Dolly Parton keep coming, a recording of the late country music singer honoring an American Jewish journalist has recently surfaced.
Never before released in America, the song, “A Bridge Across,” sung by Parton and accompanied by the Nashville Symphony, honors slain journalist Daniel Pearl.
The song features spare lyrics set to violin music composed in honor of Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was brutally murdered by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002.
Originally recorded in 2008 by Parton, renowned fiddler Mark O’Connor, and the Nashville Symphony, the song was intended to be part of a compilation album called This is My America, produced and funded, oddly enough, in Canada but never released in the U.S.
It was O’Connor and his wife Maggie who resurrected the recording this fall, shortly after the deaths of Parton and another musician that connected the four artists: Oregon violinmaker Jonathan Cooper, who died in September.
Deeply troubled by the journalist’s murder in 2002, Cooper learned Pearl was an amateur fiddler and set out to create a quartet of string instruments – two violins, a viola and a cello – in the journalist’s honor. He entrusted the instruments to O’Connor to use during his annual summer music camp in North Carolina. Every year since, four students from the camp have received one of the Daniel Pearl memorial instruments to play for a year.
“These young people carry the message that love fights hatred through music-making and understanding that Daniel Pearl’s family want him remembered for,” O’Connor told The New York Times. Likewise, Cooper’s loving gesture inspired Parton, O’Connor said.
Canadian violinist Samantha Robichaud received one of the violins in 2005 and has gone on to become a successful recording artist with more than a half dozen albums. She has toured North America as an ambassador for the Daniel Pearl Foundation, sharing Pearl’s story, including his passion for
music and its power to change lives. Enter songwriters Tom McBryde and Lynn Wilbanks, whose introduction to Robichaud inspired verse.
On the album, the Nashville Symphony played one of Robichaud’s compositions while Parton introduced Pearl to listeners.
“He believed that music was something that could cross all social barriers, political borders and imaginary boundaries,” Parton says, before singing McBride’s and Wilbanks’ lyrics.
“A bridge across a question one journey begins, one step at a time to a place within.
A bridge across a border, a hand reaching out one heart at a time to erase the doubt.
A bridge across a difference can close a divide, one song to be sung on the other side.”
“It was perfect. She knows what he stood for,” Pearl’s father, Dr. Judea Pearl, told the Forward. “She was such a giving person.”
Judea Pearl met Parton in 2018 at the Los Angeles Press Club where she received that year’s Public Service Award for Contributions to Civic Life for her Imagination Library, which sends free books to children. (It inspired the creation of the PJ Library for Jewish books.) The Press Club recently dedicated its upcoming National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards to Parton’s memory.
In 2018, Judea Pearl was there to present the Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism to Saudi Arabian writer and blogger Raif Badawi whose wife accepted the award while he served a 10-year prison sentence for his online activism.
The foundation devoted to Daniel Pearl’s legacy has been less visible since the 2021 death of Pearl’s mother Ruth who, as a young girl, witnessed and survived the anti-Jewish pogroms in Baghdad known as the Farhud.
As the 25th anniversary of his son’s murder approaches in February, Judea Pearl said the foundation will start a new chapter under his daughters’ leadership. Parton’s song lends the effort a touching soundtrack.
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