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For many Jewish teens, COVID broke the synagogue habit
This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives.
(JTA) — Jordy Levy, 18, remembers sitting at the table with his family, enjoying a relaxed Shabbat dinner at his Atlanta home during the pandemic. There was no hassle of getting dressed up, no schlep to synagogue, just hanging out and spending time with his family. In the background, a Facebook livestream of his congregation’s Friday night services played.
This is a scene that has become largely familiar over the course of the pandemic. COVID-19 forced many synagogues to close their doors and move their services and programs to virtual platforms. Many synagogues saw overall engagement grow as a result of this shift.
And yet for many Jewish teens, Levy’s experience was the exception. The technology, which in some ways made connecting with synagogues more convenient, caused a loss of connection among teens that has lingered even now that most congregations are back in person.
“I know a lot of kids just stopped going to synagogue outright because with COVID-19 they were so used to not going,” said Jill Mankosky, 18, a member of the Conservative Agudas Achim Congregation in Alexandria, Virginia. “This year when the High Holiday services were in person again, I noticed a lot of my classmates who would have been there previously pre-COVID-19 were just not there anymore.”
Congregations are now at a crossroads, determining which direction they want to move in next as the world slowly transitions away from the pandemic.
“Return back to normal is a bad way to phrase it because there is really no normal,” said Maya Kamenske, 16, a member of Agudas Achim.
Especially for Conservative congregations like Kamenske’s, the switch to online prayer was a significant one. In 2001, the Conservative movement’s Jewish law committee prohibited counting someone participating in an online manner towards the prayer quorum, or minyan needed for communal prayer. Virtual services initially breached this decision, although the ruling was soon amended to allow virtual Shabbat services during the pandemic.
Teens Jaqui Drobnis, left, and Max Gordon, right, lead a Tu Bishvat seder with a group of first graders at Agudas Achim Congregation in Alexandria, Virginia. (Courtesy of Chaya Silver)
Virtual services increased accessibility by making it simpler for people who would otherwise struggle to be at the congregation to still participate. For example, Jonah Golbus, 17, said that there were times when he was unable to find a ride to his synagogue, Rodef Sholom in San Rafael, California. Now, he does not have to worry about that. Virtual services allow people more flexibility for participation, and can be squeezed more easily into schedules.
“Having [online] High Holiday services as an option for those who [either] can’t or don’t feel up to coming in person is a really good addition that I’m glad we’ve kept,” said Mankosky. “I’m hoping it continues because, for example, when I’m in college, I can’t come back for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services, but I’d still like to attend the services of [my] synagogue. Having an option to do them on Zoom from my dorm or something would be really helpful.”
Many synagogues saw a definite spike in participation and engagement of their members overall after implementing virtual services made participation simpler. This was not the case for teen programs, though. Many teens interviewed for this article reported that engagement dropped when it went digital.
Kira Rodriguez, a senior in high school and member of the Rodef Sholom congregation, tried to stay involved after Rodef Sholom went virtual, and attended a number of virtual activities for the first few months. Eventually, it just became too much.
“I was just so mentally exhausted from always being on Zoom,” said Rodriguez. “I couldn’t take another two hours of it [for the teen activities].”
Golbus, who struggled to find rides to Rodef Sholom, said that he was never really engaged on Zoom, so he did not attend any of the virtual programming during the pandemic. Now that he has friends who are in-person again, he has become more active in his congregation. Still, the events look different than they used to.
“It’s not as crowded as it used to be,” said Golbus. “There’s less people I know, so there’s less of an incentive on my end to go to these [activities].” He said that it is just less of a habit to go to temple now than it used to be before the pandemic, even if people are slowly reverting back to how it was.
The pandemic-related loss of in-person interactions damaged teens’ social connections within their congregations. While some teens returned to their congregations as they began to open back up, others never did.
Mankosky also blames the decline in participation to her and her peers starting high school and becoming increasingly busy. What is normally a period fraught with change for teens became, in many instances, even more challenging as COVID-19 took its toll. She is not alone in feeling more disconnected from her peers.
Teens from Congregation Rodef Sholom in San Rafael, California enjoyed a kayaking trip as a way to spend time together outdoors. (Courtesy of Rudy Brandt)
“I remember there was a really communal aspect to the congregation before. My religious school class [and I] were really really close. We often invited each other to our birthday parties outside of religious school, even though most of us didn’t even go to class together,“ said Jacob Bensen, 15, about Agudas Achim. ”It was almost like having a second family.” Now, he says, this has fallen to the wayside as the class has mostly lost touch since COVID-19. Most people haven’t put in the effort to reconnect since returning in-person.
Mila Einspruch, 16, had a different experience with Zoom during the pandemic. Prior to COVID-19, she said that she was on the track towards dropping all involvement with her congregation, Temple Sinai, in Oakland, California. With virtual school, Einspruch was unable to hang out with people as she had before. Her Reform congregation had a monthly Zoom club for eighth graders aimed at engaging and conversing. It was such an enjoyable experience that she became more involved in her congregation after it opened back up.
Yet even for those like Einspruch who returned, the community still feels different than it used to.
“Now, everything’s a little bit more fragmented,” said Einspruch. “The biggest thing that’s blocking people from coming [to temple] is just [that] those [social] connections are gone.”
Despite all of this, Rodriguez saw a spike in attendance following COVID-19 at her Reform congregation, Rodef Shalom, as there was a lot of initial excitement to be back in the building together. She said that faded within a couple of months as the initial novelty wore off. Now, there are odd gaps in ages between the teens. There are few freshmen and sophomores that show up, whereas the upperclassmen, like herself, are more likely to participate in activities. A few teens weighed in on why this is happening.
“It feels like there’s this gap of time where I would have started to get more involved after eighth grade into freshman year where there’s this transition of becoming older and going to those activities [beyond religious school], but then that’s when COVID-19 hit for me,” said Adina Golbus, 17, belongs to Rodef Sholom with her brother Jonah. “COVID-19 I think had a part in [me not going to as many activities] because it kind of prevented that transition period.”
All of the trips and activities planned to ease this transition were canceled, exacerbating the rate at which teens stopped being active members in their congregations. Einspruch had a similar experience with the lack of structure.
“Straight out of our bar and bat mitzvahs, there would have been some scaffolding and structure [to motivate teens] to join the teen program,” Einspruch said. COVID-19 dismantled that.
However, Rodriguez said that the number of middle schoolers, particularly seventh graders, has shot up. Einspruch saw the same at Temple Sinai. Neither could point to a reason for the engagement.
Rudy Brandt, the director of youth engagement at Congregation Rodef Sholom, said that the pandemic was particularly tough for teens, so her goal was to design a no-pressure model of youth engagement where teens were able to engage when and how they wanted. To do this, she offered activities across the spectrum, from Get Out the Vote efforts on Zoom to movie conversations to cooking. Much of this is still the case even in-person.
Rodriguez, who also belongs to the Rodef Sholom congregation, said that these programs were particularly successful with the younger teens, and could be a part of why there were so many of them. Despite this, the revamped programming has not seen the same effects with the older kids. In an attempt to communicate and connect more with teens, Brandt and her colleagues have grown their social media footprints.
“[It’s] just kind of meeting teens where they are, trying to put, you know, what’s happening in our spaces in their faces via social media,” Brandt said.
This greater presence has been somewhat successful at encouraging teens to participate in their various youth programs.
“There have been some events that I didn’t go to when I saw [the posts on social media] it was like, I kind of wish I went to that. Maybe I’ll go to the next one,” said Golbus.
Rodef Sholom is not the only congregation that has changed their youth programs to see more engagement. Chaya Silver, the youth director at Agudas Achim Congregation in Alexandria, Va., is currently working on developing a hybrid program for the religious school at her congregation, with the goal of making it more inclusive and flexible for students and their families.
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Oct. 7 spurred this secular private school in Manhattan to start holding an annual Shabbat gathering
(New York Jewish Week) — A new Jewish tradition has taken hold at a private, non-Jewish school in Manhattan.
On a recent Friday, about 240 students, parents and educators from the Town School, located on the Upper East Side, stayed late to eat matzah ball soup, recite blessings over challah and candles, and sing Hebrew songs.
It was the third time in as many years that the school had held a Shabbat celebration, and more than half of the students and parents in attendance weren’t Jewish.
“I think there is a real enthusiasm and excitement for families who are not Jewish to come into their first Shabbat or learn more about it again,” said Pierangelo Rossi, the Town School’s director of equity and community action.
Originally from Peru, Rossi is not Jewish. His first Shabbat experience ever was at the Town School in 2024, after Jewish parents organized a gathering in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
For years, the school had special “affinity groups” and spaces for students and parents of color, for “white anti-racist” students, and for queer students and their allies. The attack, and the surge of antisemitism that followed, spurred Jewish students and parents to work with the school to create their own.
While the Town School does not collect information about students’ religion, officials estimate that at least a quarter of the student body is Jewish.
“After Oct. 7, we knew — and it became clear to all of us — that our Jewish community was looking for that sense of affirmation in a way they hadn’t before,” said Head of School Doug Brophy.
Brophy, who has led the Town School since 2018, understood how they felt. He is also vice president of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on the Upper West Side.
Affinity groups have emerged as a hot-button issue in the debate over DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion. While their proponents say the groups give minority and marginalized populations desperately needed spaces of their own, critics of DEI say the groups can reinforce divisions and inappropriately inject progressive ideologies into schools and other institutions.
Jewish “anti-woke” advocates have particularly criticized the affinity group framework for too often forcing Jewish students into a binary framework about race and privilege that does not recognize the complexity of Jewish identity.
At the same time, tensions amid the aftermath of Oct. 7 roiled some New York City private schools. The head of one elite private school stepped down last summer after members of the school community clashed over identity, antisemitism, Islamophobia and the Gaza war.
At the Town School, officials and parents say, those tensions have been absent. Instead, the entire school community has embraced the Shabbat celebrations alongside the other special events held to honor students’ traditions, such as a lion parade on the school’s block to mark Lunar New Year and a Persian New Year observance led by parents.
“Whether it’s coming from a vulnerability or a difference, it’s [about] wanting to be part of something bigger than yourself, and not just our Jewish families and colleagues feeling a sense of identity, but everyone else developing a greater sense of empathy,” Brophy said.
The Town School is not the only non-Jewish private school in the city to hold Shabbat celebrations in recent years: Riverdale Country Day School in the Bronx says 700 people attended its November 2024 gathering. But it has committed to annual gatherings, which are growing in attendance.
That first Shabbat in 2024 was led by Rabbi Bradley Solmsen from the Conservative Park Avenue Synagogue; in 2025, by Rabbi Rena Rifkin from Stephen Wise; and this year, by Ana Turkienicz, an educator from the Upper West Side’s Rodeph Sholom School and the Pelham Jewish Center.
“For me, it was really a very different context where you have non-Jews that are interested in learning about what is it that Jews do and are open,” Turkienicz said. “And it was beautiful.”
To create an educational plan that was still engaging for children of all ages, she narrowed the focus of the event to two words: “Shabbat” and “shalom,” meaning “Sabbath” and “peace.”
“I need to use vocabulary, and I need to work with the room only, with those with concepts that are universal,” Turkienicz added. “And there is a lot. There’s a lot in ‘Shabbat’ and ‘shalom’ that are universal.”
She taught the guests the songs “Bim Bam” and “Salaam” — the latter being the Arabic word for “shalom” — and recited the blessings over the candles and challah, and the younger children decorated placemats, while the older children hung out with their classmates.
14-year-old Daniel Rybak stuck around near the school after his last class of the day got out so he could attend the after-school Shabbat service for his second time.
Rybak, whose mother is Catholic and whose father is Jewish, has attended the Town School for nine years.
“Just talking about the greater world at this point, with all the troubles in the Levant, with Israel and Gaza, as well as just the general sense, I suppose, that things are getting a little more violent around the world — it’s just a nice thing that brings people back to that sense of, ‘Hey, we’re here, we’re family, we’re OK, we’re getting through this,’” Rybak said. “It just shows that even throughout all that that’s happened everywhere, there’s still pockets of community and of real hope.”
This year, the Shabbat gathering took on added meaning for some attendees as some of New York’s Jews feel increasingly alienated or afraid following the election of Zohran Mamdani, a longtime and staunch critic of Israel, to the mayor’s office.
“The whole time I was thinking: 20 blocks north from here, there is a new mayor that we don’t know what [he’s] going to be for the Jewish community in New York,” Turkienicz said. “Twenty blocks south of his mansion, we have a private, non-Jewish school doing a Kabbalat Shabbat.”
Katy Williamson, a Jewish parent who helped organize the last two Town School Shabbats and attended this year’s, said she was “really blown away by the sense of community” and surprised by how many people attended.
“I read the news. Obviously, we live in New York City. I’m very aware of what’s going on outside of this, just in the world right now,” she said. “There was just this really warm feeling. … So many people from the school community joined and wanted to be a part of it.”
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Trump’s antisemitism envoy rebukes European rabbi, drawing praise from Elon Musk
(JTA) — A disagreement over how to define the sources of rising antisemitism in Europe escalated into a public clash this week between two prominent Jewish leaders, with tech billionaire Elon Musk intervening to back the U.S. government’s antisemitism envoy over a prominent European rabbi.
The dispute centers on remarks made Wednesday at the World Economic Forum by Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, the president of the Conference of European Rabbis, during a panel discussion on antisemitism, extremism and social cohesion.
Responding to a question about the surge of antisemitism in Germany and beyond, Goldschmidt said the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel had triggered a dramatic global rise in antisemitic incidents, including what he described as organized and state-sponsored activity on university campuses and in public spaces.
Goldschmidt then linked broader political developments in Europe to immigration-related anxieties.
“I think the rise of the extreme right in many European countries is a response to the insecurity felt by the so-called old Europeans regarding the new immigrants who came from the Middle East,” he said.
He went on to argue that combating antisemitism and Islamophobia together was in the shared interest of Jewish and Muslim communities, pointing to past interfaith initiatives he said had helped promote social cohesion.
Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, publicly criticized Goldschmidt’s remarks on X, calling them a misreading of the drivers of contemporary antisemitism in Europe. The intervention marked one of Kaploun’s first major public statements since his Senate confirmation in December.
“Blaming ‘old Europe’ for the present surge in antisemitism is disgraceful,” Kaploun wrote, arguing instead that mass migration has played a significant role in recent antisemitic violence and threats to Jewish safety.
“I am proud to serve in an administration that understands that mass migration is a huge driver of antisemitism,” Kaploun wrote. “It creates dramatic social changes and threatens the safety of all citizens. This administration, led by President Trump and Secretary Rubio, recognizes and confronts today’s challenges with clarity. Mass migration itself threatens the safety of Jews and all communities.”
Musk, the owner of X, amplified Kaploun’s critique by reposting his comments and replying, “Exactly. Thank you for speaking up,” a move that quickly broadened the dispute beyond Jewish communal circles.
Goldschmidt responded within hours, rejecting the characterization of his remarks and saying they had been taken out of context. He said he did not blame European culture for antisemitism and reiterated that he views antisemitism as stemming from multiple ideological sources, including the far right, the far left and radical Islamist violence.
“I never blamed ‘old Europe’ for the current rise in antisemitism,” Goldschmidt wrote, adding that his Davos comments were intended to explain political reactions to immigration, not to excuse antisemitic attacks.
The exchange highlights a growing divide among Jewish leaders over how to frame antisemitism amid polarized debates about immigration, integration and public safety — debates that have increasingly spilled into partisan politics in the United States.
Kaploun’s emphasis on migration echoes language used by Vice President JD Vance, who said in December that reducing immigration was “the single most significant thing” the United States could do to curb antisemitism, while dismissing claims of rising antisemitic sentiment within the Republican Party.
The dispute also reflects longstanding institutional tensions. Kaploun is affiliated with the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, which has grown into a dominant force in Jewish communal life in Russia and parts of Europe. Goldschmidt, a former chief rabbi of Moscow who left Russia after refusing to endorse the war in Ukraine, represents a European rabbinic establishment that has at times clashed with Chabad over authority and representation.
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Rabbi among dozens arrested in faith leaders’ anti-ICE protest in Minnesota
(JTA) — At least one local rabbi was arrested Friday in Minneapolis as hundreds of faith leaders from around the country gathered to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in the Twin Cities.
Rabbi Emma Kippley-Ogman, the Jewish and interfaith chaplain at Macalester College in St. Paul, was briefly detained by police alongside leaders of other faiths while staging a protest at the airport.
In photos and video from the protest just before the arrest, Kipley-Ogman can be seen delivering brief remarks while wearing a rainbow tallit and standing in a line at the airport’s arrivals gate with several other faith leaders who hold hands and pray. Kipley-Ogman did not immediately return a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment.
Rabbi Aaron Weininger, who leads the Conservative Adath Jeshurun Congregation in Minnetonka, was also demonstrating at the airport and witnessed Kippley-Ogman’s arrest. He said the rabbi “was in the lineup of clergy being prepared to get arrested.”
“The goal was to disrupt operations because [the airport] is being used to deport folks, like three flights a day,” Weininger told JTA. He described the overall mood of the protest as “very peaceful.” In photos from the event, he is wearing a tallit and holding a sign reading “ICE Out of Minneapolis.”
He continued, “The clergy brought out the best of what faith does, which is lifting people up, building community and speaking up for justice. There was song, there was prayer, a lot of relationship-building. The crowd was calm but also very clear, calling to the end of the atrocities that ICE is committing.”
In an Instagram video from the airport, Rabbi Daniel Kirzane of the Reform KAM Isaiah Israel in Chicago, wearing a beanie from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, said he had come to the protest because “the Torah teaches us that society and government are meant to protect people, not to scare them and not to brutalize them.”
The three were among an estimated 100 rabbis and Jewish leaders on the ground for “ICE Out” events across the Twin Cities Friday, after local clergy issued a broader call for a show of strength to combat the region’s intensified ICE activity over the past few weeks. Many local Jewish institutions, including the federation, the JCC, Jewish day schools and Jewish social services groups, have condemned ICE’s presence.
While mainstream Jewish groups say they are not opposed to responsible immigration enforcement, a steady stream of distressing incidents in Minnesota — including including the shooting death of Renee Good by an ICE agent, the detention of a 5-year-old child, and agents reportedly forcing open the door of a U.S. citizen — have galvanized a faith-based response in starkly moral terms.
“What did we learn from the Holocaust? We have to act and we have to resist,” one visiting rabbi, Diane Tracht of Reform-affiliated Temple Israel near Gary, Indiana, told Religion News Service while patrolling a heavily Hispanic and Somali region looking for ICE activity. “If I’m not going to act and resist now, then I shouldn’t call myself a rabbi and I can’t be a proud Jew.”
Dozens of the rabbis on the ground Friday were activated through T’ruah, the Jewish social justice network. Also present were Rabbi Jonah Pesner, head of the Union for Reform Judaism’s religious action center; Avodah CEO Cheryl Cook; Bend the Arc CEO Jamie Beran; and members of Conservative Judaism’s social justice commission, among others.
“It’s all rooted in the biblical commandment that we were slaves in Egypt, and we’re to love the stranger,” Pesner told TC Jewfolk, a local Jewish news site. “The biblical text repeats that 36 different times in 36 different ways, and it really calls our clergy to action.”
The airport protest was just one of several anti-ICE events that local and national clergy staged in the Twin Cities area Friday, amid frigid temperatures that saw wind chill as low as 40-below. Temple Israel, a prominent Reform congregation in Minneapolis, also hosted an interfaith prayer service.
“Each and every one of our traditions believes in the dignity of every human being,” Temple Israel Senior Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman told the gathered crowd Friday morning, to applause.
After extolling the virtues of the region’s diversity, Zimmerman added, “When I began this work, and I was ordained in 1988, I said these words. But it wasn’t against the reality that we have today. Now we have to walk these words. We have to live these words. And it is, in my mind, the moment that history will define us. And guess what, history is on our side.”
Another local Jewish leader took a different protest tactic, urging a day of fasting on Friday.
“In Jewish tradition, when a community faces crisis, violence, injustice or moral collapse, we do not look away. The Talmud describes an ancient custom of instituting communal fast days,” Rabbi Tamar Magill-Grimm, senior rabbi at the Conservative Beth Jacob Congregation in Mendota Heights, said during an interfaith press conference earlier in the week. “Fasting is not about self-affliction. It is about clarity. It is about refusing to numb ourselves to suffering.”
Vice President JD Vance visited Minneapolis on Thursday, where he sought to defend the Trump administration’s immigration policies while also hoping to “turn down the temperature.”
Faith communities have emerged as a crucial dimension of the protests, with Attorney General Pam Bondi announcing Thursday the arrests of three anti-ICE protesters who had been involved in disrupting a church service over the weekend. A planned anti-ICE rally in New York City Friday afternoon was set to feature Rabbi Stephanie Kolin, of Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn, as one of the speakers.
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