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From pop stars to tefillin pop-ups, Oct. 7 changed how Israel’s ‘somewhat observant’ practice Judaism
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — In the weeks after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, religiously charged videos started circulating on social media. Dozens of young women posted videos of themselves cutting up their “immodest” clothing, jeans, crop tops, minidresses, vowing to replace them with modest skirts and head coverings.
In one viral TikTok clip, a young influencer solemnly shears her wardrobe to shreds, declaring it an offering for national deliverance. “Creator of the world, as I cut these clothes, cut away the harsh decrees against Israel,” she says, explaining that she would not even donate the garments lest she “cause someone else to stumble” by wearing them.
Other images circulated too, of tefillin pop-ups, neighborhood challah-bakes and, on both social media and the street, a noticeable rise in religious amulets and pendants. Hamsas, Stars of David and necklaces shaped like the map of Israel or the ancient Temple in Jerusalem appeared everywhere.
Two years later, as the grinding war in Gaza largely wound down, those early scenes have taken on the feel of a specific moment in time. Still, the spiritual jolt of those first weeks has not fully faded, and increased religious practice has become part of the country’s daily rhythm.
A poll released in November by the Jewish People Policy Institute found that 27% of Israelis have increased their observance of religious customs since the war began. Roughly a third of Jewish Israelis say they are praying more frequently than before the war, and about 20% report reading the Tanach or psalms more often.
JPPI head Shuki Friedman said that many Israelis, and especially the young, felt the war had reconnected them to tradition and Jewish identity “not necessarily in a halachic way, but in a way that shows up very strongly in their lives and in the public space.”
Crucially, the shift has been most dramatic among Israelis who already had one foot in tradition — those raised in “masorti” or traditional but not strictly observant, homes. While the masorti category has its roots in Middle Eastern and North African (Mizrahi) communities, where religious observance was historically more integrated into daily life but less rigid than in European Orthodoxy, today masorti Israelis span all sectors of Israeli society. (The category is distinct from the Masorti movement, the name for Conservative Judaism in Israel and Europe.) Roughly one-third of Israeli Jews identify as masorti, with JPPI breaking the group into two categories: “somewhat religious” and “not so religious.”
The Jewish demographer Steven M. Cohen once quipped that masorti Israelis are those who “violate the laws that they do not wish to change” – meaning they accept traditional Jewish law, known as halacha, as valid, but selectively observe it in practice. Cohen also noted there’s no real American equivalent, though the closest parallel might be “non-observant Orthodox.”
Among young Jews who identified as “somewhat religious” masorti, 51% of respondents in the poll reported deepening their religious practices during the war.
David Mizrachi is one of them. Raised in a masorti home, Mizrachi had never been consistent about synagogue attendance, Shabbat observance or laying tefillin. Since Oct. 7, he said, he does all three — religiously.
For him, the change grew out of the shock of the attacks and the losses that touched his own circle. He personally knew the Vaknin twins, killed at the Nova party, and Elkana Bohbot, the hostage snatched from the rave who was released after two years in captivity. Those events, he said, pushed him into “cheshbon nefesh,” a Jewish reckoning with his identity.
“I understood that these enemies and terrorists came because we were Jewish, not because we were Israelis,” he said.
In some households the response went further still. Rozet Levy Dy Bochy, raised masorti and married to a non-Jewish Dutch man who decided after Oct. 7 to convert, said Oct. 7 drew her deeper into observance.
“It felt like we were in a horror film, but faith provided an anchor,” she said. “Knowing that everything was part of God’s plan and in the end something different, something good, was waiting for us was comforting.”
The dynamic experienced by Mizrachi, shaped by the violence that afflicted people he personally knew, aligns with another survey released in September by the Hebrew University, which found that direct exposure to the war, whether through bereavement or injury, was closely associated with changes in religiosity and spirituality. Roughly half of respondents reported higher levels of religiosity and spirituality, including a quarter who said they had become more religious and a third who described a rise in spirituality.
That trend has been reflected most vividly in the accounts of released hostages that have filled Hebrew media over the past year, with former hostages describing making kiddush on water, keeping Shabbat for the first time or rejecting pitas during Passover in the tunnels beneath Gaza.
It has rippled through pop culture, too. Actor Gal Gadot told her 106 million followers on Instagram that while she’s “not a religious person,” she had decided to light a candle and pray for the safe return of all the hostages.
Israel’s biggest pop star Noa Kirel, not known for religious observance, marked her November wedding with a mikveh immersion, a hafrashat challah (challah-separation) gathering, along with a henna party of the type that is common among Mizrahi Jews.
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Another of Israel’s most popular singers, Omer Adam, long considered secular, now wears tzitzit, studies Torah, and keeps Shabbat.
It’s now common to see Israeli celebrities sharing Shabbat candle-lighting rituals, including secular TV host Ofira Asayag, who, a year into the war, pledged to do so on-air until the hostages came home.
For sociologist Doron Shlomi, who studies Israeli religiosity, none of this is surprising, because collective crises often produce similar effects. Drawing on research from earthquakes, wars and the Covid-19 pandemic, he described the two years of war as “a kind of laboratory” for seeing how people turn toward faith.
“War always brings two things,” he said. “More religiosity and more pregnancies.”
Shlomi argued, however, that the hostages and their families sit apart from the rest of the population. For many of them, he said, a turn to religion was a survival tool, and he expects some will go on to live fully observant lives.
But in the broader public he sees two main patterns. The first is piety as a form of public service and solidarity that manifests in personal habits, like observing a single Shabbat or donning tzitzit in honor of the hostages, the fallen, and the soldiers.
The other pattern runs through institutions and organizations that seized on the moment, from ultra-Orthodox groups like Chabad hosting barbecues on army bases to Christian evangelicals joining support efforts.
Although increases outnumbered declines, the Hebrew University and JPPI studies both found a smaller counter-current. About 14% of secular respondents in both surveys said their religiosity had weakened, and 9% of Jewish respondents in the JPPI poll reported a drop in belief in God, a figure that rose to 16% among secular Jews.
The Hebrew University researchers framed their findings through a psychological lens, drawing on terror management theory, which argues that confronting mortality pushes people to double down on their existing worldviews — deepening religious practice for some and weakening it for others.
“During periods of prolonged stress, individuals may reorganize their religious or spiritual orientations by either increasing or decreasing their importance,” said Yaakov Greenwald, who led the study.
It’s not the first time war has nudged Israelis toward faith. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel experienced a notable uptick in people returning to religion, including high-profile secular figures. Film director Uri Zohar shocked the nation by becoming ultra-Orthodox in 1977. A year later, Effi Eitam, a decorated brigadier general and later a politician, did the same.
Historians debate how large that post-’73 wave really was, but at the time the narrative took hold that the near-death experience of the state — Israel was caught off guard and feared annihilation in the first days of that war — followed by an against-all-odds turnaround felt to many like a miracle.
Shlomi said it is still too soon to make firm predictions about how long the current trend will last, given that the country is only now emerging from the crisis. Even so, he believes the scale of the war and the religious wave it produced were deep enough that, a decade from now, it will still be there.
And if the experience of Rozet Levy Dy Bochy’s husband, Peter Griekspoor, is any indication, the war may leave the country not only more observant down the line but with more Jews altogether.
At first, Rozet said, her husband responded in a “very European” way, seeking balance and “both-sides-ing” the situation. She told him that was a luxury of not being Jewish, but that “for us, something in our DNA reacts in moments like this. We’ve been here before.”
But it did not take long for the balance to tilt. As protests spread across Europe and North America and conspiracy theories about Israelis and Jews circulated online, Peter said he was “starting to feel like part of the narrative.”
“I felt the antisemitism was personal,” he said. “Now I actually feel like I’m Jewish. I feel like I want to be part of this people. They are beautiful, they are strong, they are resilient,” he said, before adding with a laugh, “and they are horrible also. Always arguing, always fighting each other.”
Shlomi said that while much of the revival grew out of a real desire for unity and belonging, some of it acquired a coercive edge, with some rabbis and others treating “returning” to faith as the only legitimate response and investing significant funding in amplifying it. “Tefillin and barbecues cost a lot of money,” he said.
He also noted that the rise in religious practice often moved in tandem with a political realignment, with some public figures openly embracing observance. On Channel 14’s flagship “Patriots” current-affairs show, rightwing host Yinon Magal now speaks frequently about becoming more observant since the war, a change that links faith with nationalist politics.
A number of survivors from the traditionally left-leaning kibbutzim on the Gaza border that were attacked on Oct. 7 have described similar movement in their own lives, adopting more religious practices, like remarrying in an Orthodox ceremony, and identifying more strongly with the right. JPPI survey data shows the same trend among Jewish youth, with a clear rightward drift across most political camps.
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Mizrachi, however, bucks that trend. A peace activist and board member of Standing Together, a grassroots Jewish-Arab movement that campaigned against the war, he has grown more observant without changing his politics.
“I am a Jew first, then an Israeli, then a democrat, then a Mizrahi,” he said. “I see God in every aspect of life. But I also ask, until when will we live by the sword and be filled with hate for Gazans? This isn’t the Jewish way.”
For Griekspoor, the Jewish way meant the halachic way, and for the past six months he has been enrolled in an Orthodox conversion program under the Israeli rabbinate, a track that mandates full observance of Jewish law. He says he knows his choice in becoming Jewish defies logic.
“You have the persecution, the hatred, the antisemitism — and you can’t eat cheeseburgers,” he said. “But there is no rational explanation. It’s stronger than me.”
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A gunman attacked a Michigan synagogue. Here’s what happens to the community next
On Thursday, a driver rammed his pickup truck into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Hills, Mich., a large Reform Temple about 25 miles from downtown Detroit. Blessedly, there were no casualties besides the shooter, whom security guards rapidly engaged. One guard was injured. Aside from that, everyone who was inside the synagogue, including 140 children attending school there, was unscathed.
“There’s hopeful news and there’s sad news about the aftermaths of these shootings,” said Mark Oppenheimer, author of Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood, a methodical, lyrical look at what happened to the Pittsburgh neighborhood shattered by the Oct. 27, 2018 shooting that left 11 people dead.
The hopeful news is that older, established Jewish communities can rely on close, long-established bonds within and outside the community to get them through.
The sad news is that people unaffected by the shooting tend to move on and forget.
“So whereas this will haunt the Jewish community for years,” Oppenheimer told me in a phone interview, “most people outside the Jewish community will quickly move on to whatever the next horrible incident is.”
What happens next
Authorities have not confirmed the attacker’s motive, although he has been identified as a Michigan man who was born in Lebanon. But among all the unknowns, we do know a few things for certain.
We know that a great tragedy was averted due to the guards’ bravery and expertise, and due to the planning and preparation of synagogue leadership.
We know such attacks have gone from being extremely rare in the United States, to being more frequent.
And we know that what happens now, in the aftermath, matters a great deal.
That’s why, in writing about the worst mass shooting in American Jewish history, Oppenheimer spent most of his time researching what came after the atrocity.
“When the cameras and the police tape were gone, what stayed behind?”Oppenheimer, who teaches at Washington University’s John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, wrote in the book’s introduction.
The power of connection
Both the Tree of Life synagogue and Temple Israel are older, deeply entrenched congregations with close ties to a number of local communities — Jewish and non-Jewish alike.
In one chapter of Squirrel Hill titled, simply, “Gentiles,” Oppenheimer chronicles how non-Jews came to the aid of the stricken congregation, including clergy, politicians and neighbors.
Emblematic of that was the capacity crowd of 2,500 people that came together at Soldiers and Sailors auditorium on the one-year anniversary of the shooting, where law enforcement, politicians and Christian, Muslim and Jewish clergy all spoke.
“There are usually people in government, in community organizations, in neighborhood organizations, who reach out, who want the Jews to know that they’re not alone,” said Oppenheimer.
Evidence of such connection was already on show in Michigan on Thursday. One reporter interviewed a woman praying outside the synagogue, who said, through tears, that the “Holy Spirit” had told her to turn her car around once she saw police cars racing past her to the scene, and go lend support.
In Pittsburgh, the 2018 shooting was also a time for the Jewish community itself to come together.
Squirrel Hill’s close-knit Jewish community crossed denominational divides to show support. An Orthodox rabbi organized a spreadsheet to manage the 24-hour vigils Jewish law prescribes over the bodies of the dead prior to burial.
“In Squirrel Hill, one of the nice things is there is a lot of community and solidarity across denominational lines and levels of observance,” said Oppenheimer, “and that’s pretty rare in American Judaism. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out in Detroit.”
A new reality
Iin recent years, the need for solidarity and resilience in the face of such attacks has become, unfortunately, more apparent.
When Oppenheimer wrote his book, he was able to state the shooting was “a unique event” in American history. It’s true that until the Tree of Life massacre, antisemitic violence had claimed just 26 lives in U.S. history. The U.S., more than any Western country, and far more than Israel itself, had truly been a safe haven for Jews.
Since Squirrel Hill, six more people have died in four attacks. The previously well-earned sense of safety has been shattered.
“While the odds that any given Jew will be attacked remain quite low, it is obviously pretty terrifying,” said Oppenheimer.
Some critics of the national focus that fell on Squirrel Hill after the Tree of Life shooting argued that the tragedy got far more attention than similar mass shootings that had befallen non-Jewish communities.
But it’s the very rarity of these attacks that makes them so shocking and, at least for American Jews, so memorable.
In this new normal, it’s even more important for Jews to form strong, mutually supportive bonds among themselves, and with others.
And the world moves on
Those bonds are especially crucial because while the victims of violence don’t soon forget and move on, the world does.
“It’s a short burst of solidarity, and then people leave. Understandably so,” Oppenheimer said.
I suspect that even though prayers of gratitude and deliverance will echo through the sanctuaries of Detroit — and in Jewish hearts everywhere — the attack will haunt its intended victims long after the police tape comes down.
What will make the difference in how the community faces those fears and moves forward is the amount of support it receives from those outside it. If the broader Bloomfield and Detroit community refuses to forget this awful incident, it will change the course of healing.
I asked Oppenheimer what lesson he learned from the Tree of Life aftermath could apply to Temple Israel.
“In Pittsburgh, there was a long history of people showing up for each other,” he said Oppenheimer. “The relationships, or lack of relationships, that exist become more noticeable when something goes wrong.”
“Where there are strong ties before a shooting, there are strong ties afterwards.”
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Political standoff causing DHS shutdown delays security grants for synagogues
(JTA) — A shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security since Feb. 14 is halting the review of millions of dollars in security funding for nonprofits, leaving Jewish institutions and other vulnerable groups in limbo at a moment of heightened concern about antisemitic threats.
The most recent threat came Thursday when an armed assailant rammed his vehicle into a large synagogue in suburban Detroit, where trained security forces shot at him and he was killed before he could injure anyone.
The closure stems from a political standoff over immigration enforcement: Senate Democrats are refusing to fund DHS unless the bill includes new oversight and limits on ICE operations, while Republicans and the Trump administration insist on passing funding without those changes. The dispute intensified after the killings of U.S. citizens during recent immigration operations.
Applications for the federal Nonprofit Security Grant Program, which helps synagogues, schools and community centers pay for security guards, cameras, reinforced doors and other protections were due Feb. 1 But because the program is administered through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a component of DHS, the ongoing shutdown has frozen the process before applications could be reviewed. An effort to end the shutdown failed in the Senate on Thursday.
That means organizations that spent months preparing proposals are now waiting indefinitely to learn whether they will receive funding, at a time of rising anxiety and threats.
The grant program has become a cornerstone of security planning for Jewish institutions across the United States, especially in the wake of sometimes deadly attacks. Demand for the grants has surged in recent years as antisemitic incidents have climbed and security costs have soared.
According to data from the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic incidents in the United States have reached historic highs in recent years, with Jewish institutions frequently targeted with threats, vandalism and harassment. Community leaders say the uncertainty surrounding the grants is arriving at precisely the wrong moment.
The NSGP is designed to distribute hundreds of millions of dollars annually to nonprofits considered at high risk of attack. Organizations submit detailed applications outlining their vulnerabilities and the security improvements they hope to fund, which FEMA then reviews and awards through state agencies.
But during a federal shutdown, most DHS personnel responsible for reviewing those applications are furloughed. As a result, the process has effectively stalled.
For many nonprofits, the delay creates practical and financial uncertainty. Security upgrades such as surveillance systems, bollards, access-control systems and trained guards often depend on the grants, and institutions typically plan their budgets around the expectation of federal support.
Jewish communal security groups say the program has been one of the most successful federal efforts to help protect religious institutions. Michael Masters, CEO of the Secure Community Network, a Jewish security nonprofit, said Jewish organizations rely on federal funding to cover essential security needs, saying that it was “a challenge” that DHS was currently not processing security grant applications.
“There’s no other faith-based community in the United States that needs to spend $760 million a year, at a minimum, on security that we do,” Masters said. “That’s a reality of the threat environment that we have to adapt to, that we have adapted to.”
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A gunman rammed a Michigan synagogue. Its security preparations may have saved lives.
(JTA) — The suspected assailant, armed with rifles and smoke bombs, who rammed into Temple Israel on Thursday encountered a synagogue that was well prepared for just such an attack.
He hit and injured the congregation’s security director with his car as he plowed through the synagogue’s doors and drove down a hallway. But he didn’t manage to harm anyone else as he was found dead after trained and armed security guards shot at him
And because the rest of the staff knew exactly how to respond to an active shooter threat.
“We always worry that you can plan and plan and plan and practice and practice, and it won’t matter, because it will be something else, but it feels like a miracle that everything worked the way it was supposed to, that our team was so incredibly brave, local law enforcement’s been amazing, and that everybody’s OK,” Rabbi Jen Lader of Temple Israel told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard and West Bloomfield County Police Chief Dale Young also immediately praised the security response in the wake of the attack.
“I am deeply proud of the response, not only from the security that was on site, but also of all the police officers and the firefighters that are here right now, we train on active shooter events a lot,” Young said during a press conference outside the synagogue on Thursday. “I think that training certainly helped to mitigate what happened here today.”
Indeed, it was a situation that Jewish institutions across the United States have trained for, as antisemitism and threats of violence have ticked up in recent years, especially following the 2018 synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh that killed 11 Jews during Shabbat services. The rabbi of a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, credited a security training with enabling him to respond when a man took him and three congregations hostage in 2022.
“Everybody flees danger, and our team went straight toward it, and they were the ones who neutralized the terrorist and saved everybody,” said Lader. “And our teachers followed, you know, to the absolute letter, our active shooter training and lockdown procedures, and saved every kid.”
Beyond the synagogue’s full-time director of security, Lader said Temple Israel also has a full team of armed security guards on the premises at all times as well as a remote security system that is able to secure different areas of the building during threats.
In late January, FBI agents also visited Temple Israel to train clergy and staff about how to respond to an active shooter.
According to a social media post from FBI Detroit, the Active Shooter Attack Prevention and Preparedness course “combines lessons learned from years of research and employs scenario-based exercises to help participants practice the decision-making process of the Run, Hide, Fight principles and take necessary actions for survival.”
Michael Masters, the national director and CEO of the Secure Community Network, an organization that coordinates security for Jewish institutions nationwide, said that the outcomes of the attack Thursday reflected the preparedness of Temple Israel.
“Investing in security is an investment, it’s a down payment on the Jewish future,” said Masters. “The community that made up the synagogue, the larger Detroit Jewish community, has been making that investment for years and years, and today, that investment paid off and lives [were] saved.”
Among the security measures that Masters said his organization recommended were “bollards or fences or natural obstructions” to the building, controlling access to the facility through reinforced doors or windows and having a security presence.
“What we hope this reaffirms is that security needs to be an ongoing investment in order to allow Jewish life, faith based life, to thrive,” said Masters. “And very much that investment can result, and did result, in Jewish lives being saved, and so we all need to recognize that and commit ourselves as members of the community at every level to be a part of making that investment at whatever level we can.”
In the wake of the fatal shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington D.C. in June, the synagogue hosted a town hall on hate crimes and extremism.
Among the speakers at the town hall was Noah Arbit, a lifelong congregant of Temple Israel who represents West Bloomfield in the Michigan House of Representatives. Arbit said in an interview on Thursday that after he first learned of the attack while working on the state house floor, he immediately began to cry and raced down to his home synagogue.
“I campaigned on taking on hate crimes,” said Arbit. “To be working on these issues, and then to see it come home to roost in my own community, in my own synagogue, in my hometown that I represent is, frankly, just like my worst nightmare.”
While Arbit praised the response by security and law enforcement as the attack unfolded, he said he was “outraged and enraged and deeply pained that it was necessary in the first place.”
“Jewish communities across the country and world have watched, you know, for the past decade, as our institutions have congealed into fortresses,” he said. “We are now forced to live behind, basically, you know, militarized, institutionally securitized institutions, and what a shame that is. It’s not just a shame, It’s unfathomable, it’s unforgivable.”
For Rabbi Mark Miller of Temple Beth El, another Reform synagogue a 20-minute drive away in Bloomfield Hills, the attack on Temple Israel served as a stark reminder of why security infrastructure was essential for Jewish institutions.
“This is one of those moments when, for years and years, we have bemoaned that we have to put so much time and energy into security for our institutions,” said Miller. “And this is one of those days that reminds us that we don’t have a choice.”
Miller’s synagogue had a recent security crisis of its own, when a man drove through its parking lot in December 2022 and shouted antisemitic threats as parents walked their preschoolers into the building. The assailant, Hassan Chokr, was sentenced to 34 months in prison in September for illegally possessing multiple firearms inside a gun store after leaving the synagogue.
“It’s a terrifying day, obviously for a lot of people, especially for parents with their kids at not only Temple Israel but at ours and other temples and Jewish institutions,” Miller said.
Lader said that among her congregants, two competing sentiments had jumped out: Those who “never, in a million years, in our heart of hearts, thought it was ever going to happen to us” and others who “knew it was only a matter of time before it knocked on our door.”
But another feeling was even stronger, she said.
“I think the overarching sentiment, and the one that I want to make sure gets out there, is our absolute gratitude to our internal teams, our amazing staff, local law enforcement and our teachers for really, like, a building full of absolute heroes, who were able to keep us safe,” Lader said.
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