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In a twist, German rabbi at scandal’s center cedes rabbinical school ownership to Berlin Jews
(JTA) — In a shocking development, the embattled founder of Germany’s non-Orthodox rabbinical schools has relinquished his ownership stake in them to the Jewish Community of Berlin.
The 25,000 euro transaction means that Rabbi Walter Homolka is no longer in control of the Reform Abraham Geiger College and the Conservative Zacharias Frankel College at the University of Potsdam.
The sale achieves a result that the Central Council of Jews in Germany, the seminaries’ main funder, has been trying to reach openly since late last year, after two investigations confirmed that Homolka had abused his power at the seminaries.
The Jewish Community of Berlin had not publicly been part of the efforts to overhaul the schools launched after allegations against Homolka broke into public view last May. The allegations initially related to a sexual harassment scandal involving his husband, who was also his employee, but widened to implicate other aspects of Homolka’s leadership.
The group’s announcement late Wednesday of the purchase, executed the day before, initially alarmed some who have been advocating for changes at the seminaries, because the plan did not clearly rule out a role for Homolka. The Central Council of Jews in Germany issued a statement lambasting the fact that the deal “took place without consultation with the students, employees, or the donors” and said the new arrangement would not improve rabbinical education in Germany.
But in a hastily arranged meeting Thursday, Berlin Jewish Community President Gideon Joffe assured Josef Schuster, the council’s head, that Homolka would not be part of the seminaries going forward. The meeting left Schuster prepared to collaborate with Joffe’s group, a spokesperson for the council confirmed.
Now, the path is clear for the official Jewish community to seize authority over non-Orthodox rabbinical training in the country where Reform Judaism was born in the 19th century.
“This may not be the ideal situation, but it is a compromise that allows almost everyone to live with the results,” Cantor Itamar Cohen, the graduate whose complaint kicked off the scandal, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. He said he would fully embrace the offer “if it is accepted by Klal Israel, the majority of the Jewish community as encapsulated in the main representing bodies.”
Concerns about the surprise announcement largely reflected worries that Homolka could have structured the deal in a way that benefits him.
Rabbi Walter Homolka, then rector of the Abraham Geiger College, in the Liberal Jewish community’s synagogue in Hanover, Germany in December 2016. (Julian Stratenschulte/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Two separate investigations — one by the university and the other by lawyers commissioned by the Central Council — recently determined that Homolka had created an “atmosphere of fear” among students and staff in the very institutions he launched more than 20 years ago. The final report from the Central Council investigation is expected to be released in the coming weeks. Homolka has steadfastly maintained his innocence.
In the wake of those findings, there was an increasing appearance of desperation on the part of the old guard to hold on to control of the two seminaries. In December, days after the damning Central Council interim report was issued, the Union of Progressive Judaism in Germany — with a newly elected board friendly to Homolka — announced it had replaced the interim director of the Geiger College with its own appointee. The Central Council promptly nixed that plan, calling the Union of Progressive Judaism a puppet of Homolka and announcing its appointment of the scholar Gerhard Robbers to work on restructuring the two colleges.
Skeptics of the latest development said they were sure Homolka’s influence would emerge somewhere, for example in appointments to the reconstituted institutions.
“I don’t find this reassuring,” said Nick Hoermann, a current student at Frankel College. “It has been clear for a while now that Homolka’s only way to act in the future would be through back doors.”
But for now at least, the Central Council — which initially called the sale announcement “astonishing” — says it is ready to work with the Jewish Community of Berlin.
Though the official community’s move came as a surprise to many, Joffe and his team had been considering some kind of rescue maneuver since the scandal broke last May, Ilan Kiesling, a spokesperson for the community, said in an email to JTA. The concrete plan emerged only after the damning preliminary expert opinion came out in December.
Joffe approached Homolka directly at that point and convinced him “that a completely fresh start at [Abraham Geiger College] was indispensable – together with a complete renunciation of all his leadership positions. Rabbi Homolka agreed to this renunciation and transferred all shares of the non-profit limited company to the community,” Kiesling wrote.
The legally binding takeover took place this week, and did not cost the community anything beyond “the capital contribution of the limited company in the amount of 25,000 euros,” Kiesling said.
He added that the community “guarantees a complete and transparent new start” for the Geiger seminary. “There will no longer be an accumulation of offices” under one person, one of the habits for which Homolka has been criticized. There was no specific reference to the Frankel College, which until now has appointed its own academic leadership.
The community plans to establish an international advisory board and an external contact point for students to report any problems. Early on in the scandal, it emerged that Cohen’s complaint had been investigated internally, by parties beholden to Homolka.
Kiesling also told the JTA that the community had engaged a former community president, Rabbi Andreas Nachama, chair of Germany’s liberal rabbinical conference, known as ARK, to advise them from a rabbinical perspective. Nachama was ordained by the U.S.-based Alliance for Jewish Renewal movement and leads an egalitarian Reform congregation in Berlin.
In his statement Wednesday, Joffe said, “The top priority for us at the moment is to bring the Abraham Geiger College into calm waters and pave the way for the students to continue their education in a stable structure.”
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The post In a twist, German rabbi at scandal’s center cedes rabbinical school ownership to Berlin Jews appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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New York City Officials Condemn Formation of Anti-Israel ‘Global Oppression’ Group in Mamdani Admin
Candidate Zohran Mamdani speaks during a Democratic New York City mayoral primary debate, June 4, 2025, in New York, US. Photo: Yuki Iwamura/Pool via REUTERS
A growing number of New York City officials are speaking out against the new “Global Oppression and Public Health Working Group” formed in Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration, arguing that the coterie foments antisemitism and increases hatred against the city’s Jewish community.
A cohort of staffers within the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene reportedly formed the group and declared its purpose is to explore how supposed “global oppression” operates and affects health equity and the wellbeing of certain communities in the city. In its initial meeting, which lasted one hour, a presenter explicitly cited the conflict in Gaza as “ongoing genocide” and framed it along with other forms of alleged oppression as relevant to health outcomes, the New York Post reported.
“We really developed in response to the ongoing genocide in Palestine,” one presented said, according to video acquired by the Post. “And the working group aims to address the growing interests among the health department staff to learn about current and ongoing global oppression in its many forms and how it influences the advancement of health equity.”
Critics, including City Council leaders, say the working group crossed a line by focusing on international politics and critiques of a foreign government instead of core public health responsibilities like managing diseases. They argue this represents a misuse of taxpayer-funded time and resources.
Joann Ariola, a member of City Council, lambasted the group’s presentation as a distraction from the city’s actual health issues. She also accused the staffers of injecting “antisemitic activism” into city agencies.
“New York City already has an overwhelming plethora of health-care issues on its own. There is no need to begin a discussion on the problems facing other countries when there are so many issues to be tackled here at home,” she said in a statement.
“What this is, to be clear, is thinly veiled antisemitic activism that is attempting to normalize itself within a city agency,” she continued. “If Mayor Mamdani truly wants to create a New York for all New Yorkers, then he will join the growing chorus of lawmakers in condemning this group, because health care is not the arena for cultural or political bias to be tolerated.”
Lynn Schulman, a council member representing Queens, said she was “deeply troubled” by the group and urged the staffers to refocus their efforts on the critical health issues impacting the city’s residents rather than foreign affairs.
“I’m deeply troubled that New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) employees launched a so-called ‘working group’ focused on foreign political issues — during work hours and using city resources — while New Yorkers face serious and urgent public health challenges at home,” she said in a statement.
“This incident is especially troubling given the alarming rise in antisemitism we are seeing in New York City, including multiple antisemitic incidents reported in recent weeks,” she continued. “Hosting a meeting that promotes inflammatory accusations while ignoring antisemitism entirely only deepens division and alienates Jewish employees and residents.”
Figures from the New York City Police Department (NYPD) released last week showed anti-Jewish hate crimes in the city skyrocketed by 182 percent in January during Mamdani’s first month in office compared to the same period last year.
Mamdani assumed office amid an alarming surge in antisemitic hate crimes across New York City over the last two years, following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
Jews were targeted in the majority (54 percent) of all hate crimes perpetrated in New York City in 2024, according to data issued by the NYPD. A recent report released in December by the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism noted that figure rose to a staggering 62 percent in the first quarter of 2025, despite Jewish New Yorkers comprising a small minority of the city’s population.
City Council Speaker Julie Menin called for an investigation into the health workers’ group.
“Our health-care officials should be fighting infectious diseases and addressing skyrocketing health-care costs instead of spending public time debating geopolitics on city time,” said Menin, who represents Manhattan.
“A thorough investigation into the use of taxpayer resources is necessary to protect the public trust and address the unacceptable rise in antisemitism across New York City,” she added. “Hosting a meeting that promotes inflammatory accusations while ignoring antisemitism entirely only deepens and alienates Jewish employees and residents.”
The outrage over the group has gone beyond city council to former officials and prominent associations.
Mark Botnick, an aide for former Mayor Mike Bloomberg, suggested that the group’s political bias could endanger the city’s residents.
“This is shocking. If these NYC Health Department staffers truly believe Israel is committing genocide, will they now boycott the Israeli pharmaceutical companies that make lifesaving drugs New Yorkers depend on?” he said. “Or is this just performative politics that has no place in a taxpayer-funded public health agency?”
Yael Halaas, president of the American Jewish Medical Association, also condemned the group’s presentation.
“This is a meeting using New York City Department of Health resources that promote libel against the Jewish people,” she said.
Moshe Spern, president of United Jewish Teachers, claimed that the presentation is part of a broader pattern of city officials abusing their powers to spread anti-Israel propaganda throughout critical agencies.
“Jewish city workers are struggling and honestly all agencies are turning a blind eye,” he said. “That is why we are all collaborating together. They cannot and will not divide the Jewish community anymore. We cannot allow this bias in NYC to continue.”
Mamdani, a far-left democratic socialist and anti-Zionist, is an avid supporter of boycotting all Israeli-tied entities who has been widely accused of promoting antisemitic rhetoric. He has repeatedly accused Israel of “apartheid” and “genocide”; refused to recognize the country’s right to exist as a Jewish state; and refused to explicitly condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which has been associated with calls for violence against Jews and Israelis worldwide.
Leading members of the Jewish community in New York have expressed alarm about Mamdani’s election, fearing what may come in a city already experiencing a surge in antisemitic hate crimes.
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University of Nebraska Says BDS Measure Passed by Student Government Isn’t School Policy
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) participating in a “Liberated Zone” encampment at University of Nebraska, Lincoln in November 2025. Photo: Screenshot
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) has implored the public not to regard a student government resolution endorsing the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel as an official statement of policy, citing its irrelevance to the institution’s decision-making process.
“While the University of Nebraska respects student governance and our students’ right to voice their perspectives, the members of the NU Board of Regents do not have plans to act on the divestiture resolution passed during Wednesday’s [Associated Students of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln] meeting,” board chairman Paul Kenney said in a statement. “Our Board of Regents retains final authority of university policy … UNL remains committed to fostering a safe and respectful environment for students, faculty, staff, and community members.”
As reported by The Algemeiner last week, UNL’s student government agreed to a vote on the measure, an initiative pushed by the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) organization. The resolution passed on Wednesday by a wide margin after being doggedly argued against by Jewish students who were subjected to unfounded allegations about links to Israel.
Launched in 2005, the BDS campaign opposes Zionism — a movement supporting the Jewish people’s right to self-determination — and rejects Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish nation-state. It seeks to isolate the country with economic, political, and cultural boycotts. Official guidelines issued for the campaign’s academic boycott state that “projects with all Israeli academic institutions should come to an end,” and delineate specific restrictions that its adherents should abide by — for instance, denying letters of recommendation to students applying to study abroad in Israel.
The student government, facing public scrutiny, ultimately amended the resolution to remove any mention of Israel and rename it the “Divest for Humanity Act.” The measure demanded divestment from armaments manufacturers to block “weapons complicit in the genocide and atrocities worldwide.”
SJP exalted its passing as a victory for its mission to foster a climate in which pro-Israel support in the US is untenable.
UNL’s SJP chapter has praised Hamas terrorists as “our martyrs,” promoted atrocity propaganda which misrepresented Israel’s conduct in the war against Hamas, accused Israel of targeting “Palestinian Christians,” and distributed falsehoods denying Jewish indigeneity to the land of Israel. Since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, the group has denounced UNL’s alleged ties to Israel, which includes a partnership in agricultural research, as investments in “death” even as it accuses the institution of Islamophobia.
The national SJP group, which has been linked to Islamist terrorist organizations, has publicly discussed its strategy of using the anti-Zionist student movement as a weapon for destroying the US.
“Divestment [from Israel] is not an incrementalist goal. True divestment necessitates nothing short of the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself,” the organization said in September 2024. “It is not possible for imperial spoils to remain so heavily concentrated in the metropole and its high-cultural repositories without the continuous suppression of populations that resist the empire’s expansion; to divest from this is to undermine and eradicate America as we know it.”
At the time, the tweet was the latest in a series of revelations of SJP’s revolutionary goals and its apparent plans to amass armies of students and young people for a long campaign of subversion against US institutions, including the economy, military, and higher education. Like past anti-American movements, SJP has also been fixated on the presence and prominence of Jews in American life and the US’s alliance with Israel, the world’s only Jewish state.
Antisemitism on college campuses is pervasive, Jewish students reported in a recent survey conducted by the StopAntisemitism advocacy group.
Fifty-eight percent of respondents reported having “been a victim of antisemitism on campus” while 88 percent who brought the matter to campus officials said they were dissatisfied with the handling of the investigation. Sixty-five percent said they felt “unwelcome as a Jew in certain spaces” at some point and 61 percent said diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives do little in the way of reducing hatred.
“The 2025 findings prove that antisemitism on campus is systemic, not episodic. It is embedded in the culture, policies, and power structures of higher education,” the group said. “Jewish students who report harassment are routinely dismissed, ignored, or retraumatized. Administrators hide behind ‘process,’ either because they too are afraid or, worse, because they are complicit. Faculty validate and amplify extremist rhetoric, some even teaching it in class. And DEI offices, the very departments tasked with protecting minority students, often serve as engines of anti-Jewish hostility.”
Elite colleges are often the most hostile environments, the group said in a report which assigned mediocre and failing grades to over a dozen elite American colleges, citing the institutions’ failing to mount a meaningful response to the campus antisemitism crisis.
Of all the Ivy League universities assessed by StopAntisemitism, only three — Cornell University (C), Dartmouth College (B), and Princeton University (D) — merited higher than an “F.” StopAntisemitism, which is led by executive director Liora Rez, said other schools in the conference, such as Harvard University and Yale University, continue to offer Jewish students a hostile environment, citing as evidence feedback it has received from Jewish students who attend them.
“At Harvard, Jewish students report high levels of self-censorship and antisemitism, with federal authorities finding the university showed ‘deliberate indifference.’ Despite new initiatives, the campus climate remains tense and accountability uncertain,” the report said. “At Yale, Jewish students faced harassment, exclusion, and blocked access, prompting a federal investigation. Despite policy changes, the campus remains hostile and unsafe for Jewish students.”
Other elite schools such as the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Wesleyan University didn’t perform well either. Ds and Fs were given to the lot. Meanwhile, in the Washington, DC metropolitan region, a destination for students aspiring to future roles in government, American University and Georgetown University earned Ds.
“Even since the recent Gaza ceasefire agreement, antisemitism remains loud, bold, and unchecked, revealing that none of this is about Israel but instead is about Jew-hared, plain and simple,” the report said. “Coordinated protests, ideological harassment, and institutional apathy continue to endanger Jewish students. Families must confront the facts: Are you prepared to send tuition dollars to a school that allows your children to be threatened, targeted, and blamed simply for being Jewish?”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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NCJW names new leader as group steps up work on Israel, antisemitism
The National Council of Jewish Women has named Jody Rabhan, its longtime policy director, to lead the organization as it grapples with how to balance progressive advocacy with support for Israel.
The 133-year-old group has helped rally Jews in favor of reproductive rights, especially after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade four years ago, but drifted closer to more conservative Jewish establishment organizations amid the Israel-Hamas war.
Some of the drive behind that shift appeared to come from Sheila Katz, before she announced she was stepping down as CEO in the fall. “We need those who claim to be our friends to passionately and unequivocally condemn antisemitism,” Katz posted shortly after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack. “Silence is not neutrality; it’s complicity.”
The organization joined with a coalition of Jewish groups that took an especially hard line on criticism of Israel, including the Conference of Presidents and the Brandeis Center, during a spat with former President Joe Biden’s Education Department.
“Oct. 7 really changed everything, and that trajectory for NCJW was very real,” Rabhan said in an interview with the Forward. “And in some ways that made a lot of sense for us.”
Rabhan referenced instances of sexual assault against women on Oct. 7, and against Israeli hostages in Gaza, and said that NCJW was well-positioned to address antisemitism on the left because it participated in many progressive coalitions. “It’s work that we are committed to continuing,” she added, noting that countering antisemitism and hate was a new addition to its current strategic plan.
Israel has “certainly always been part of our portfolio and that’s only going to grow,” said Laura Monn Ginsburg, the president of NCJW’s board of directors.
But Rabhan, who first joined NCJW over 25 years ago, also emphasized the importance of staying “in community” with non-Jewish organizations on the left. “Particularly in this moment, where we’re in an administration that is really testing the levers of our democracy, we need one another more than ever,” she said, referencing President Donald Trump.
Katz, who now works for the Jewish Federations of North America, praised Rabhan in a text message as a “powerful and deeply trusted choice” to lead the organization, and said she would continue “strengthening both our communal voice and our broader civil rights impact.”
NCJW has undergone several significant changes in recent years. Nancy Kaufman helped shift its focus from community service to advocacy during her time as CEO in the 2010s, including relocating its headquarters from New York to Washington, D.C.
Katz was hired shortly thereafter as a rising star in the Jewish world. She came from Hillel International, where she served as vice president for student engagement and participated in a New York Times investigation into sexual harassment allegations against financier and philanthropist Michael Steinhardt.
During her tenure, Katz helped mobilize Jews following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, including raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to help fund abortions and providing educational materials and other resources for synagogues and Jewish organizations that wanted to get involved in promoting reproductive rights.
More than 2,000 clergy signed onto its “Rabbis for Repro” campaign, while synagogues across the country hosted their own “Repro Shabbat.” Yet NCJW has since had to navigate deep divisions in the reproductive rights world over Israel following Oct. 7 that have included allegations of antisemitism at major abortion advocacy nonprofits.
NCJW has not historically lobbied on behalf of Israel, even as it has long worked on gender equality issues there. Nevertheless, it has occasionally found itself targeted by progressive activists including the local D.C. chapter of the Sunrise Movement, which briefly sought to boycott the organization over its stance on Israel.
“Sometimes you have to change partners in certain moments — and we’re not afraid to do that when necessary,” said Ginsburg, the board president. “But overall we want to be in partnership and we want to find a way to make that work.”
The post NCJW names new leader as group steps up work on Israel, antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.