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In Israel, a struggle to reconcile grief and joy as Sukkot and Oct. 7 coincide
(JTA) — On the second anniversary of the Hamas massacre, Israelis grappled with how to mark the date which overlapped with the first day of Sukkot, when Jewish tradition requires festivity.
The government postponed official remembrances until the day after the Simchat Torah holiday that bookends Sukkot rather than the Gregorian anniversary. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came under fire for initially failing to acknowledge Oct. 7 directly, writing a social media post that read simply “Happy Sukkot.”
The convergence of the festival’s religiously required joy with the memory of mass death set off a broader debate over whether celebration and grief could coexist. Some religious leaders and community groups, including the Reform movement, urged weaving remembrance into holiday rituals — lighting candles, reading names, adding prayers for the fallen — while others argued that Sukkot’s happiness should remain intact, with official mourning deferred.
Some Israelis traveled south to visit sites of the attacks, including at official memorials at some of the kibbutzes that were devastated on Oct. 7, but larger crowds were expected on Wednesday, the first of the intermediary days of Sukkot. Travel is prohibited on the first day for those who adhere to traditional interpretations of Jewish law.
Even among the bereaved, observance varied. British-Israeli Gaby Young Shalev, whose younger brother Nathanel Young, a soldier, was killed in action on Oct. 7, said her family chose to celebrate the festival with friends and relatives before turning to commemoration.
“I tried not to think about the fact that it’s Oct. 7. Because I really think it’s important that we don’t let these atrocities of Oct. 7 ruin our chagim,” she said, using the Hebrew word for Jewish festivals.
But once the holiday day ended on Tuesday evening, Young, her parents and sister Miriam went to Tel Aviv’s Yarkon Park for the Oct. 7 memorial organized by Kumu (“Rise Up”), an initiative set up by families of victims and hostages as a counterpoint to the official state ceremony.
The event was livestreamed globally and screened simultaneously at Hostages Square. It opened with released hostage Agam Berger performing the theme from “Schindler’s List” on violin. Between speeches from hostage relatives, bereaved families and released captives, well-known Israeli musicians performed on a stage that was a tableau of symbols: a burned-out car like those destroyed along the Gaza border, encircled by red crown anemones — the national flower and an emblem of remembrance — a bullet-riddled bomb shelter, and 48 suspended yellow chairs representing each hostage still in Gaza.
Singer Yuval Rafael, who survived the Nova festival massacre and later represented Israel at Eurovision, sang with Daniel Weiss, whose parents were murdered by Hamas. Zvi Zussman, father of Maj. Gen. (res.) Ben Zussman, killed in December 2023, recited the Yizkor prayer, while Elchanan Danino, whose son Ori was kidnapped and later murdered in captivity, recited the Mourner’s Kaddish.
Eurovision contestant Eden Golan addressed the livestream in English, saying the nation “had been holding its breath” for two years and calling for the release of the 48 hostages still held in Gaza. She performed “I’m Coming Home” as images of hostages filled the screen behind her. The crowd erupted in chants of “Everyone, Now,” the slogan that has become shorthand for demanding their return.
Unlike last year, the memorial was open to the general public and drew an estimated 30,000 people. In 2024, 50,000 tickets had been reserved by the public but organizers were forced to curtail attendance to the press and victims’ families amid security threats. For Young, the crowd’s size this year conveyed a collective response beyond those most directly affected.
“It’s a reminder that it’s not just about the bereaved families or the families of hostages,” she said. “The whole country is mourning.”
At last year’s memorial, Young told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that it was the first time her brother’s death had truly sunk in. In the months before, she said, her family’s grief had been buffered by “happy” distractions — the birth of her twins, her parents’ aliyah from the United Kingdom, and the flurry of projects created in Nathanel’s memory. But as another year passed and she returned to the same spot this October, the sense of loss felt sharper. The passage of time, she said on Tuesday, had made his absence harder, not easier.
“We realize that Nathanel’s not just on a long holiday, but that he’s not actually coming back,” she said. The release last month of the army’s year-long investigation into what happened on his base that morning, she added, made the loss feel newly immediate. Still, “we live life with a lot of purpose,” she said. “We keep his spirit alive by asking, even in the most everyday situations, what would Nat do?”
Young said she resonated deeply with an image shared on stage by fellow bereaved speaker Tomer Zak, whose parents and younger brother were killed in the attacks. Zak compared herself to a tree that had lost its leaves but whose roots remained strong. For Young, the metaphor captured the tension between devastation and resilience.
“When other people look at it from the outside they’re like, how can this person continue with their lives? But the memory and the light from the person we lost, from Nathanel, makes us keep going, makes us stronger. It gives us these magic powers — you basically want to do all these things for them,” she said.
To that end, the family have set up a memorial fund in his name to support projects for youth at risk, including young people with ADHD and other forms of neurodivergence, reflecting what she described as Nathanel’s determination to overcome his own setbacks in life and help others do the same.
A few miles east in Bnei Brak, the atmosphere was strikingly different. Late at night, Hasidic music blasted from the Beit Hashem synagogue during a simchat beit hashoeva — a Sukkot celebration where worshippers dance and play music late into the night during the holiday’s midweek nights. Men in fur streimels streamed inside while children chased one another through the narrow alleys.
Asked about the tension between celebration and mourning, several attendees said they were unaware the Gregorian anniversary of Oct. 7 had arrived. Down the road, emissaries of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement had erected a roadside sukkah draped with yellow Mashiach flags — contrasting with the yellow hostage ribbons ubiquitous at the Tel Aviv memorial — and were handing cotton candy to children.
Yossi, one of the Chabad volunteers, said the date did not change their message. “We pray every day for the return of the hostages and the safe return of the soldiers. In all our daily prayers and also when we read from the Torah,” he said.
A woman in a tank top said that despite identifying herself as secular, the attack’s timing would fix the memory to the Hebrew calendar. “I can’t separate from the fact that it happened on Shabbat and also such a joyous festival — Simchat Torah. [Hamas] took that from us forever.”
In Holon, south of Tel Aviv, Eyal Golan spent the day at home. His youngest sister Shirel, a Nova festival survivor, died by suicide shortly before the first anniversary of the attacks. He could not bring himself to attend a memorial, he said, but added that looking after his two small daughters, the youngest of whom is a newborn, took precedence.
“The mental is affecting the physical,” he said of the migraines he was suffering. “I felt a sense of emptiness all day and I struggled with my own PTSD just to function.”
As the event in the Yarkon Park wrapped up, the crowd stood to sing Israel’s national anthem. For Young, the moment tied mourning to resolve. “It’s a collective grief but also a collective hope, that’s how I felt at the end of ‘Hatikvah.’ Yes, we are all grieving, but there’s something with Am Yisrael, with the Jewish people and with Israeli people. We keep going.”
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FBI charges 8 tied to U of Michigan pro-Palestinian movement with threatening officials, Jewish federation
(JTA) — The FBI arrested eight pro-Palestinian demonstrators connected to the University of Michigan Wednesday, charging them with conspiracy to threaten university leaders and their families as part of a pressure campaign to get the school to divest from Israel.
The charges were filed May 20 and unsealed Wednesday following arrests in multiple states. According to the charging documents, the defendants “used encrypted messages, social media platforms, and overseas collaboration platforms to research, target, and attack their victims.” The Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit was included in the indictment as one target of the demonstrators.
The charging documents allege that the eight defendants hunted down information about multiple targets; described to each other how they would “kill,” “torment,” and “terrorize” their targets; and carried out some of their plans.
In one message, Ahmet Korkaya, who was at the time a medical student, allegedly wrote to another defendant about a member of the university’s Board of Regents that he would “poison her ass slowly.” His co-defendant allegedly replied that the group needed to “get into that house then burn it down.”
“In America, we rule by law not by fear. These alleged threats and attempts to terrorize government officials, businesses, and the Jewish Federation are anti-American,” U.S. Attorney Jerome F. Gorgon Jr., of the FBI’s Detroit office said in a statement.
The eight people charged include three men and five women all between the ages of 21 and 28. They were arrested in multiple locations in Michigan as well as in Chicago and Milwaukee.
The indictment alleges that the defendants were responsible for vandalism of the Jewish federation building on Oct. 7, 2024, the first anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel.
In addition to the federation, the targets named in the indictment include the university’s former president, Santa Ono; its chief investment officer and provost; members of its Board of Regents and their businesses; a campus police officer; and multiple companies.
The TAHRIR Coalition, a pro-Palestinian collective at the University of Michigan that has coordinated much of the campus’s protest activity, rallied supporters Wednesday to protest outside courthouses in Detroit and Milwaukee where the suspects had been detained.
Jordan Acker, a Jewish university regent, is not named in the indictment. But one of the incidents described is the vandalism of his law office in June 2024. (Acker’s car was also vandalized with pro-Palestinian grafitti while he and his children were home, just a few months later.)
Acker did not return a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment. A spokesperson for the Jewish federation declined to comment.
Federal and state authorities raided three homes belonging to campus protesters in April 2025 as part of a federal probe into acts of vandalism cited in the indictment.
The unsealed indictment represents the second major set of charges made against a group of pro-Palestinian protesters at the university. In May 2025, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel dropped state charges she had filed against seven pro-Palestinian student protesters — a different group from those arrested Wednesday. Nessel’s charges, brought the previous September, were related to the protesters’ participation in university encampments in May 2024. The attorney who defended the protesters, Amir Makled, bested Acker for the state Democratic Party’s nomination for a university oversight position this spring.
Nessel’s office was listed by the FBI as having provided “assistance” on the investigation. Reached for comment, a spokesperson for the state attorney general told JTA the office “was not involved in today’s warrant operations.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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This Israeli filmmaker harshly criticizes his country. Pro-Palestinian activists boycotted him anyway
(JTA) — Earlier this year Nadav Lapid, the award-winning Israeli dissident filmmaker, traveled with his son to Marseille for a screening of his latest film. He fell in love.
“This city reminded me of Tel Aviv, in a way, with the beach and everything,” he recounted Wednesday to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency — referring to the city he no longer lives in, having built a career with movies that take sharp aim at what he calls the “moral abyss” of Israeli society. When a Marseille film festival then invited him to serve on its jury for its upcoming installment in July, he readily accepted.
Then the boycotts started. Last month around a dozen pro-Palestinian filmmakers threatened to pull out of the upcoming Marseille International Film Festival over Lapid’s planned participation because, they said, he had accepted funding from the Israeli government to support his work. (Lapid’s movies, including his latest, have received funding from Israel’s film fund.) Following this, according to the accounts of both Lapid and the festival’s director, the festival had second thoughts about him serving on the jury.
While the festival offered him the opportunity to participate in a public master class instead, Lapid said, the protesters hadn’t relented: “It’s not enough for these people.”
Frustrated, the director earlier this week decided to pull out of the festival altogether. He’s not happy about it.
“To make people like myself the enemy when the actual state of things is so terrible, it’s insanity. It’s stupidity,” he told JTA. “For them, the highest triumph of the Palestinian cause is if they will cancel my master class in Marseille? I think it’s pathetic.”
Lapid has received a groundswell of support this week: Natalie Portman and hundreds of other film-industry figures have signed open letters criticizing the boycotts against him. While he’s uncomfortable with being in the spotlight for reasons unrelated to his films, Lapid said he’s pleased with this outcome.
“You could have composed an unbelievable cinematic program from only the filmmakers that texted me during the last hour,” he said.
Even so, the filmmaker says, he’s now unsure if he is still welcome in France as a dissident Israeli.
“I asked myself whether they would like me to stop doing movies, or to leave France,” he told JTA. Elsewhere, he’s described himself as “homeless.”
It’s the latest unspooling of painful dynamics around artistic boycotts of artists and institutions seen by the left as normalizing Israel. Last month another French cultural figure, the Jewish comics artist Joann Sfar (“The Rabbi’s Cat”), faced calls to boycott his presence at a literary festival, also in Marseille. In its justification, a pro-Palestinian artist collective, pushing an Instagram post reading “Zionists out of our city,” cited Sfar’s signing of an open letter last year that argued a Palestinian state should not be recognized unless Hamas could be disarmed and Gaza’s Israeli hostages freed.
In recent months, in addition to broader boycotts of the Israeli film and TV industry, several leading cultural critics of Israel — both Jewish and not — have been targeted as well. Those include bestselling author Sally Rooney for publishing a Hebrew-language translation of her novel with a left-wing Israeli publisher (some prominent activists accused her of exploiting a “loophole” in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against Israel); Jewish Currents editor Peter Beinart for speaking at Tel Aviv University; and Jewish author Joshua Leifer for associating with a “Zionist” rabbi at a book event.
In Lapid’s case, the group organizing against him, La Palestine Sauvera Le Cinéma, argued that “Nadav Lapid is not being targeted because of his Israeli nationality.”
Instead, the collective asserted, their objection was due to Lapid having accepted funding from Israel to complete his latest film, “Yes!”; the fact that the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival as an Israeli co-production and competed for Israel’s highest film awards; and Lapid’s past participation in an Israeli film festival in Paris.
“The cultural boycott does not target artists because of their nationality or personal opinions,” the filmmakers wrote, in French, in a blog post. “What is at issue here is the reality of their integration into the institutional and political structures of the Israeli state.”
For Lapid, whose new movie follows Israeli musicians hired to write an openly genocidal post-Oct. 7 anthem for their nation, this argument doesn’t hold water. Lapid has long been critical of cultural boycotts, including BDS. Such measures, he told JTA, are a form of “dogmatic Stalinism” and don’t “move one piece of sand” in Israel.
“I became a test case of purity,” he mused.
Others agree. More than 350 entertainment industry figures signed the first of two open letters in the French newspaper Le Monde backing him, which was published Sunday.
“Inviting an artist to a festival does not make them a cultural ambassador,” the letter reads, in French, decrying a “campaign of intimidation” against Lapid while also noting what the signatories said was the “genocidal logic” of Israel’s campaign in Gaza.
Among this letter’s signatories were Justine Triet and Arthur Harari, the Oscar-winning team behind “Anatomy of a Fall”; Harari is Jewish and a critic of Israel himself. Arnaud Desplechin, a French filmmaker who often features Jewish characters in his work, also signed. Other signers include acclaimed directors Claire Denis, Mati Diop, and Kleber Mendonça Filho; Romanian director Radu Jude, whose films have explored his country’s complicity in the Holocaust; and Palestinian historian Elias Sanbar.
A second open letter, published on Monday, calls the campaign against Lapid an “intellectual failure” and states, “No matter what crimes a state may commit, no one should be reduced to a passport.” It was signed by a smaller cohort of 10 names, including Portman; French-Jewish director Rebecca Zlotowski; and Oscar-winning filmmakers Jacques Audiard and Michel Hazanavicius.
Like Lapid, Portman — an Israeli-American actress who is one of the most prominent Jews in Hollywood — is a longtime critic of the Israeli government and opponent of the BDS movement.
Creative Community For Peace, a pro-Israel entertainment group, said Wednesday its members also oppose the boycott of Lapid, adding that Israel “funds, screens, and honors films that challenge its leaders, criticize its society, and engage openly with its most difficult debates.”
Unusually, the Marseille festival’s own director, Tsveta Dobreva, also signed one of the open letters in support of Lapid after she appeared to acquiesce to the earlier demands to pull him from the jury.
In an email, Dobreva told JTA her festival “fully supports Nadav Lapid,” saying that she had removed him from the jury out of concern he would be targeted at the event. She did not believe she had “agreed to the boycotters’ demands,” she said.
“Few festivals or cultural institutions in our days have the courage to extend invitations that may provoke controversy, and we stand with Nadav in believing that this form of self-censorship must be resisted, as it only contributes to the problem,” Dobreva wrote.
Lapid intends his next movie to be a follow-up to “Synonyms,” his 2019 film about an Israeli expat in Paris that won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival. The Marseille festival is scheduled for July, but he says now he has no intention of going: “I’ll find other beaches.”
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Trump is imagining an Israel after Netanyahu. So are many Israelis. Netanyahu isn’t biting.
(JTA) — The party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected speculation that he might not run in Israel’s election this fall, following an offhand comment by U.S. President Donald Trump.
On Tuesday, ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl tweeted that Trump had told him he was unsure if Netanyahu wanted to press forward in the elections.
“He’s had an amazing career,” Trump said, according to Karl. “Does he want to continue? Because, you know, he’s a wartime prime minister. We will very shortly win the war one way or the other, and you know he’s a wartime prime minister.”
Netanyahu has been prime minister for more than 15 of the last 17 years, losing power only briefly in 2021 and 2022. Israel’s current wars began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, triggering regional conflict that has grown to include a joint U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.
Trump’s reported comments left some wondering whether he knew something they did not, amid polling suggesting that Netanyahu will struggle to secure enough votes to put together a governing coalition after elections this fall. Could Trump know that Netanyahu is considering suspending his already-active campaign? Or could Trump, who this week told the BBC that Netanyahu does anything the U.S. president tells him to, be planning to order his Israeli counterpart to stand down amid growing anti-Israel sentiment in the United States?
Netanyahu’s Likud party soon demolished the idea. “Prime Minister Netanyahu will run in the upcoming elections — and with God’s help, he will win,” the party posted Wednesday on X.
Only a minority of Israelis were primed to appreciate the declaration, according to a poll released this week by the Israel Democracy Institute. It found that 61% of Israelis, including 27% of Likud members, do not want to see Netanyahu run again this fall. The same proportion said they want to see Israel adopt a two-term limit for prime ministers in the future.
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