Uncategorized
Every Friday for 26 years, this rabbi has circled Manhattan to inspect the eruv — even missing the birth of his 13th child. Now, he’s getting help
(New York Jewish Week) — Around 6:15 a.m. on a recent Thursday, Rabbi Moshe Tauber parked his van in the merge lane of the Henry Hudson Parkway at 72nd Street. He turned on his hazard lights and ran out of the vehicle with a flashlight. His wife, Chaya, sitting in the passenger seat, watched anxiously.
Tauber, 51, turned his head upward, shined his flashlight on the nylon fishing wire strung up 30 feet from the ground between two poles, and ran back to the car. All clear — the boundary was unbroken.
For the past 25 years, this process has been the rabbi’s routine on both Thursday and Friday mornings: leaving his home in Monsey, an Orthodox enclave in Rockland County, hours before sunrise in order to circumnavigate the entire island of Manhattan. His mission: to check every part of the borough’s eruv — the symbolic boundary, marked by strings and other man-made and natural elements, inside of which observant Jews may carry objects like food, keys and even babies on Shabbat and certain holidays.
Maintaining the eruv, which must be unbroken to be considered kosher, has been Tauber’s job since 1999. Tauber says it doesn’t make sense for someone else to sub in for him, simply because he knows the eruv so well and can do it so efficiently, after having inspected it for so many years. With Chaya’s approval, he even missed the early-morning birth of his 13th and youngest child, now 7, to check the eruv on a Friday morning. He immediately went to the hospital to visit mother and baby after his inspection was done.
“I don’t know if I can explain what I like in this job,” Tauber said. “I like it.”
Now, for the first time, the eruv inspector is getting some high-tech assistance.
Installed in August, a new sensor system created by technology entrepreneur Jerry Kestenbaum — also the creator of the residential building software company BuildingLink — magnetically snaps onto multiple locations of the eruv. The 142 sensors detect changes in the angle of the wire and send a signal to a receiver held by Spectrum on Broadway, the lighting and electrical company responsible for maintaining the line per Tauber’s instructions. The sensors themselves are battery-operated and meant to last for six to 10 years, sealed in a waterproof case.
“It gives me more comfortability,” Tauber said. But he’s not planning on ceding oversight entirely to the machines, saying, “I know I need to check because the sensors are not 100%.”
The sensors mark the first major innovation to Manhattan’s biggest eruv, installed in 1999 after Adam Mintz, then the rabbi of Lincoln Square Synagogue, requested its installation to surround his Upper West Side neighborhood. (Prior to the borough-wide eruv, different parts of the city each had their own, but travel between them while carrying anything was prohibited on Shabbat.)
According to Jewish law related to Shabbat, no items can be carried outside the home on what is supposed to be a day of rest and prayer. Recognizing this as a potential burden, rabbis in the Talmudic era devised a workaround: The boundary defined by the eruv would extend the “private” zone where carrying is permitted. Despite some community objections — sometimes from Jews and non-Jews who worry that the eruv will change the “character” of their neighborhoods, or civil libertarians who worry about the blurring of church and state — nearly every observant community, from big cities to small towns, is surrounded by an eruv.
The Lincoln Square eruv has expanded multiple times since 1999, now encompassing most of Manhattan, from 145th Street between Riverside Drive and Malcolm X Boulevard at its northernmost point, roughly down FDR Drive all the way to the bottom of Manhattan at the South Street Ferry, and back up the Henry Hudson Parkway.
In the years since he became its inspector, Tauber’s dedication to the eruv has been unflagging. He made sure it was unbroken after 9/11 (it didn’t extend all the way downtown at the time), after the 2003 citywide blackout, after Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. In Tauber’s 25 years of inspections, the eruv has only been down once over a Shabbat, during a snowstorm in 2010.
In addition to checking the eruv twice a week, Tauber helps his wife run a daycare, and he teaches boys at a yeshiva. He hasn’t taken a vacation longer than a few days for a quarter century.
Chaya Tauber said she has a theory about why he likes the eruv job so much. “[It’s] many hours of a busy week — he has more jobs, it’s not the only job — that he can be by himself,” she said.” Quiet time. I think he likes the traveling, also.”
Just two weeks ago, he helped establish an eruv around Columbia University Medical Center in Washington Heights and the surrounding apartments. Eventually, the plan is to connect it to the main Manhattan eruv — and potentially to other smaller eruvs in Upper Manhattan. There, smaller eruvs serve portions of Washington Heights with many observant Jews, including one that is home to the Orthodox flagship Yeshiva University.
Kestenbaum, whose new business, Aware Buildings, provides sensors for home security, said the idea for the electronic eruv technology came about during a conversation with Mintz, now the rabbinic leader of Kehilat Rayim Ahuvim (The Shtiebel) on the Upper West Side at the Marlene Meyerson JCC.
“I was saying to him that the sensors can be applied to many, many things that we’re used to doing manually,” said Kestenbaum, whose wife converted to Judaism under Mintz’s supervision.
“It’s a complicated eruv where the deployed environment changes,” Kestenbaum explained. “It’s not [like] in the suburbs, where the outline of the eruvs remains constant. Things go wrong. You’ve got scaffolding that gets put up. You’ve got other things that happen. The weekly eruv job is not just fixing, sometimes it’s rerouting.”
The complications are what gets Tauber out the door around 3:30 a.m. on inspection days. Not only does he beat rush hour, but once the sun begins to come up, it’s far more difficult to see the wire.
Now, the sensors can help him locate the wires more easily — and safely. “I used to walk [out of the car] because I couldn’t see it without the sensors,” Tauber said, pointing to a section near the Manhattan Bridge. “See the sensors? You don’t have to see the actual line.”
Tauber has been surprised by the willingness of various city agencies and construction crews to accommodate him in his unusual line of work.
“Even though we are Jewish, and we know we are not the most liked people here, but I never, ever had a problem with any organization or department officials, or even a construction company — they always come across,” he said. “They always look like they admire something which is religious.”
For Chaya Tauber, the early mornings and constrained vacations are worth it because of the way her husband’s work allows Manhattan Jews to observe one major law of Shabbat with ease.
“There is so much less desecration of Shabbos,” Chaya Tauber said, adding that when the eruv is up, “at least they’re not transgressing on this particular halacha. That makes this job such a responsibility.”
The post Every Friday for 26 years, this rabbi has circled Manhattan to inspect the eruv — even missing the birth of his 13th child. Now, he’s getting help appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
An Israeli media mainstay is crumbling. Will liberal democracy go with it?
The Israeli government has taken another alarming step in its efforts to crack down on the press by moving toward shutting down Army Radio, which reaches some 900,000 listeners a day.
A unanimous Monday cabinet vote to close the station is being sold as a matter of logic, efficiency and principle. Why, after all, should a military institution operate what has long functioned as a national news outlet? Why should soldiers be involved in journalism? Why should the army run a radio station that frequently criticizes the government and the defense establishment itself?
On the surface, those questions sound persuasive. In most democracies, such a setup would indeed raise eyebrows. Militaries are meant to fight wars; broadcasting current affairs, as Army Radio has since 1950, does not clearly serve that purpose. The independence of the press is a foundational democratic norm; there are good reasons to question whether a military-run outlet can uphold it. Strip away the Israeli context, and the case for closing Army Radio could sound like common sense.
But Israel is not an abstract political theory exercise. It is a specific country with a specific history, and Army Radio is a specific institution that plays a role no other outlet can fully replace. Its shuttering would be devastating. And the move to shut it down cannot be understood in isolation. It fits neatly into the broader campaign led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to weaken, intimidate or take over every independent institution capable of producing criticism, accountability, or resistance.
Army Radio is not just another broadcaster. It is one of only two national radio stations in Israel that produces comprehensive news coverage.
The other is Reshet Bet of Kan, the public broadcaster that itself has been under constant attack by this government, facing unceasing efforts to strip its funding. Eliminate Army Radio, and Israel’s radio news landscape will be reduced to a single vulnerable station — precisely the outcome critics of the government’s media policy have warned about for years.
Historically, Army Radio has been a cornerstone of Israel’s free press ecosystem. It has trained generations of journalists who later shaped the country’s media culture — some while serving as soldiers, others as civilian staff who stayed on for decades. Its newsroom culture helped normalize the idea that journalism’s role is not to flatter power, but to scrutinize it.
That tradition emerged because the IDF, uniquely among militaries, is a “people’s army,” rooted in near-universal conscription and embedded in society rather than standing apart from it. Israelis have long understood that a station staffed in part by conscripts from across the country — religious and secular, right and left, center and periphery — is not a mouthpiece in the classic sense. On the contrary, Army Radio often earned its reputation by irritating ministers, generals, and prime ministers alike.
That approach earned it broad public trust — the same kind of trust that once established the IDF’s legitimacy. Incredibly, the government is also trying to undermine that trust through constant feuding with the military brass, and a concerted effort to deflect all blame for the Oct. 7 meltdown on the military. (Both government and military certainly failed on that day.)
The effort to close Army Radio mirrors the government’s campaigns against the judiciary and the police, among many other targets. Each time, the strategy is the same: identify a real or arguable flaw in an institution that exercises independence from total government control, exaggerate it, and then use it to justify dismantling or weakening that institution.
Netanyahu’s goal — similar to the successful project led by President Vladimir Putin in Russia, and to ongoing efforts in Hungary and Turkey — is to transform Israel into a country with something close to an elected dictatorship. His arguments are never openly authoritarian, but rather procedural, managerial, technocratic — and therefore harder to resist.
Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi’s broader project to restructure, weaken, and politicize Israel’s media landscape, framed as deregulation and modernization, consistently moves in one direction: reducing independent oversight, centralizing power and increasing political leverage over broadcasters. Where takeover is possible, pressure is applied. Where it is not, closure becomes the solution. Army Radio, inconveniently independent and symbolically beloved, cannot be easily captured, pressured through advertisers, or quietly restructured. So it must be eliminated.
Public opposition to the move has been broad and intense, cutting across ideological lines. For many Israelis, Army Radio is not merely a broadcaster; it is part of the country’s civic fabric. Closing it feels less like reform and more like provocation — another deliberate escalation in an ongoing culture war designed to pit Israelis against one another.
That, too, is a feature, not a bug.
This government thrives on confrontation with institutions that command public trust. By attacking them, it forces citizens to choose sides, reframes resistance as elitism or sabotage, and mobilizes its base through grievance and the seductive argument that a government elected by a majority is always legitimate in its actions.
Army Radio, anomalous as it is, stands in the way of Netanyahu’s Putinization dreams. Its existence contradicts the idea that media must either align with power or be marginalized. It reminds Israelis that criticism from within the system is not treason but patriotism. And that is precisely what makes it intolerable to an increasingly illiberal government.
None of this requires romanticizing Army Radio or denying that its structure is unusual. Yes, a military-run news station is an oddity. Yes, in another country, reform might be justified. But democracies are not built by eliminating every anomaly. They are sustained by preserving institutions that work, even when they defy neat theoretical categories.
Israel does not need fewer trusted voices right now. It does not need another symbolic demolition of a shared civic institution. And it certainly does not need to hand its already embattled media landscape another blow on behalf of a government that does Israel devastating harm.
The post An Israeli media mainstay is crumbling. Will liberal democracy go with it? appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
How the next generation of rabbis is preparing for the age of A.I.
Denise Blumenfeld’s AI learning tool doesn’t have all the answers — or at least it’s not so eager to give them away. Instead, Blumenfeld, a second-year student at the Orthodox women’s seminary Yeshivat Maharat, has customized ChatGPT to answer her with questions with a question.
I watched recently as Blumenfeld fed a paragraph of Talmud into the module, aptly named Socrates Havruta (its surname is Hebrew for study partner). Its response tested her reading comprehension: Based on the first line of the text, what is the basic obligation around candlelighting? Blumenfeld typed in an answer, which Socrates affirmed before asking another.
She knew ChatGPT could simply summarize the text, but would that really help her learn it? On the other hand, responding to questions could help someone figure things out on their own. And to keep herself honest, she’d set a rule: “I always try to read the authentic source first,” she told me.
Blumenfeld is part of the first generation of rabbinical students who are training with artificial intelligence tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini at their disposal — and hoping to avoid those tools becoming a crutch. But the beit midrash, or study hall, is just one of many contact points they have with an invention that may be changing not only what it means to be a student or a rabbi, but also what it means to be Jewish.
To get a sense of how AI is helping shape the next generation of the rabbinate, I interviewed students from five U.S.-based rabbinical schools about how use and think about AI in relation to their work. Their attitudes ranged from guarded enthusiasm to flat rejection. But their comments — and the boundaries they had each set around their personal use — revealed the deep influence AI is already having on their professional and religious outlook.
This was true even for students who did not use generative AI at all. Adrian Marcos, a student at the Ziegler School of Rabbinical Studies, listed moral reasons he avoided it, among them its exploitation of stolen data, its environmental impact, and the digital literacy crisis it was accelerating. Yet Marcos admitted that the burden of explanation fell on AI’s detractors, not its enthusiasts.
“A lot of people are very into AI, and as a rabbi, whether or not you end up in a pulpit, you have to converse with those people,” said Marcos, a second-year student at the Conservative seminary. “And as the technology evolves, the conversations around it are also going to evolve.”
Hacking the sermon
ChatGPT can seemingly draw on the entire digitized Jewish canon, translate it from Hebrew if necessary, and draft new content about it. For students pursuing the rabbinate because of their passion for seeking and sharing knowledge themselves, the question was whether a tool that lightened the load was really helping.
Aiden Englander, a fourth-year at Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elhanan Theological Seminary, engages ChatGPT for on-call intellectual companionship. Upon finding an interesting commentary on the week’s Torah portion, he’ll ask ChatGPT for secular variations on the idea. It might spit out Nietzsche, he said, or a recent news story.
Knowing ChatGPT can make such a connection unlocks a different level of rhetorical ambition — serving as a kind of academic force-multiplier — but it forecloses the possibility of, well, sorting out his concept without it. It also raises the question of what makes a sermon “better,” and whether literature you’ve only learned about via ChatGPT summary is any less suitable for a sermon than a volume you’re still working through on the page.
Englander’s calculus was straightforward. “When you’re able to quote a book that someone is familiar with, they’ll remember it more,” he said.
Though an avid user, he harbors doubts about AI’s reliability. “It will just completely make up a Gemara,” he said, and in his view its knowledge is especially shallow in matters of Jewish law. Yet what ChatGPT can do is what makes Englander, who is 24, most cautious. In a creative pinch, he’ll ask it to bullet-point some possible themes to explore from that week’s Torah portion to write a sermon about. But that’s a muscle he’s conscious about developing, so he tries to desist.
Yet a theological question about AI use persists underneath the utilitarian concerns. Is a ChatGPT-generated d’var torah a bad idea because it’s likely to spew cliches or degrade one’s writing ability — or because the very notion of a computer recommendation defeats the purpose of the exercise, which is to bring human experience to bear upon the Torah and vice versa? Major Jewish denominations have been as quiet on the religious questions around AI as rabbinical schools have been on the practical ones, leaving students to work out both problems on their own.
“An LLM doesn’t have autobiography — it’s not having a faith experience,” said Dani Pattiz, a second-year student at Hebrew Union College. “It can come up with these brilliant syntheses of other people’s ideas. But at the end of the day, it can’t genuinely glorify God, or speak to people’s souls in an authentic way.”
A changing pulpit
As they navigated their own use of AI, rabbinical students were pondering how it would reshape the lives of their future congregants, and in turn, their own work.
On a recent trip to Washington, Micah Glickman, a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College, the flagship Reform seminary, visited a synagogue where a number of congregants had been laid off in DOGE’s federal job cuts. AI’s impact on employment, he realized, could be exponentially greater. If that were the case, it was not merely that more people would be facing financial and emotional vulnerability. It was also that a universal source of human fulfillment might have an expiration date.
“It seems like the promise of this technology is to basically do anything that a person can do, and do it better than that person can,” Glickman said in an interview. “And I wonder how that will affect a congregation of people who maybe derive a sense of meaning and purpose from their accomplishments in life.”
It would fall on rabbis and other faith leaders, Glickman said, to shepherd their communities through this change. “There’s some impending spiritual crisis that we’re on the verge of,” he said. He was helping organize a symposium at HUC to consider these and other AI-related issues — seeking a spiritual solution, he said, to a spiritual problem.
Meanwhile, he was already encountering ChatGPT-written bar mitzvah speeches from the students he tutors. That put him in the position of his HUC professors: Should he discourage kids from using it, or — conceding to inevitability — try to steer them towards using AI responsibly?
It was a theme across interviews: The future rabbis I spoke to were more worried about how the generation after them would learn than they were about their own trajectories. Today’s students, after all, largely passed their studies prior to rabbinical school without ChatGPT; they were wary of atrophy only because they knew they had muscles to begin with.
Even Blumenfeld, the Maharat student, was not sure she would recommend her Socrates bot to younger students. “Because I had experience learning and teaching before AI, I know what the result I’m looking for is, and know how to ask the right thing,” she said, whereas kids at that age hadn’t yet developed those skills. “As teachers,” she added, “we need to learn how to teach.”
They also need to teach how to learn, and why to learn. YU’s Englander recalled a thought experiment shared decades ago by the university’s former president Rabbi Norman Lamm: If you could implant a microchip into your brain that gave you complete knowledge of the Torah, would you ever have to learn? Lamm’s opinion was that learning in fact had primacy over knowledge — that the toil of studying the Torah was not just a means to an end, but a form of worship in and of itself.
“This might be a little bit more of a mystical notion, but from the standpoint of accessing Hashem, it’s only accomplished through learning the text and struggling with it, not being told what the text says by a third party,“ Englander said. The reason he could generally detect when ChatGPT was hallucinating the Talmud, he added, was because he had put in the hours studying it himself.
The post How the next generation of rabbis is preparing for the age of A.I. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Belgium Joins South Africa’s Genocide Case Against Israel at UN Court
A general view inside the International Court of Justice (ICJ), at the start of a hearing where South Africa requests new emergency measures over Israel’s operations in Rafah, in The Hague, Netherlands, May 17, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Yves Herman
Belgium officially became the latest country to join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the United Nations’ top court on Tuesday, as international pressure mounts on the Jewish state despite a US-backed ceasefire that has so far paused the two-year conflict in the Gaza Strip.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) announced that Brussels has requested to join the South African case by filing a declaration of intervention, allowing it to participate without being the original plaintiff.
Belgium joins several other countries in the case, including Brazil, Colombia, Ireland, Mexico, Spain, Turkey, Cuba, Libya, Bolivia, the Maldives, Chile, and “Palestine.”
Earlier this year, South Africa vowed to continue its genocide case against Israel despite the ceasefire in Gaza, the most significant effort yet to halt the two-year Middle Eastern conflict.
Speaking before parliament in Cape Town, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa affirmed that the US-backed peace deal “will have no bearing” on the ongoing legal proceedings against the Jewish state.
Ramaphosa promised to continue seeking “justice for the people of Gaza,” while reiterating false accusations that Israel committed genocide under international law during its defensive military campaign against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
Israel has strongly rejected all allegations of genocide, calling South Africa’s case “baseless” and “politically motivated.”
Ramaphosa’s continuing push comes amid ongoing international pressure, with the US, South African political leaders, and the local Jewish community all expressing opposition to his government’s actions, accusing it of pursuing an anti-Israel campaign instead of addressing the country’s own pressing issues.
Since December 2023, South Africa has been pursuing its case at the ICJ accusing Israel of committing “state-led genocide” in its defensive war against Hamas in Gaza.
Israeli leaders have condemned the case as an “obscene exploitation” of the Genocide Convention, noting that the Jewish state is targeting terrorists who use civilians as human shields in its military campaign.
Meanwhile, South Africa’s Jewish community have lambasted the case as “grandstanding” rather than actual concern for those killed in the Middle Eastern conflict.
Last year, the ICJ ruled there was “plausibility” to South Africa’s claims that Palestinians had a right to be protected from genocide.
However, the top UN court did not make a determination on the merits of South Africa’s allegations, which may take years to go through the judicial process, nor did it call for Israel to halt its military campaign.
Instead, the ICJ issued a more general directive that Israel must make sure it prevents acts of genocide. The ruling also called for the release of the hostages kidnapped by Hamas during the terrorist group’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.