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In synagogues and on the streets, Israel’s new ‘faithful left’ is making itself felt
TEL AVIV (JTA) — “Everyone who answers, ‘Thank God’ when asked, ‘How are you,’ raise your hand,” Brit Yakobi asked the crowd of 700 people gathered in an Orthodox synagogue in Jerusalem.
The overwhelming majority of hands shot up.
“Everyone who is mortified with our current government, raise your hand,” continued Yakobi, the director of religious freedom and gender at Shatil, an Israeli social justice organization founded by the New Israel Fund.
Once again, almost every hand went up.
The display took place at a Jan. 25 conference billing itself as for Israel’s “faithful left” — a demographic that many consider nonexistent but which is seeking to assert itself in response to the country’s new right-wing government.
Israel’s politics leave little room for left-leaning Orthodox Jews. In the United States, the vast majority of Jews vote for Democrats, and even in Orthodox communities, where right-wing politics are ascendant, liberal candidates hold appeal for some. But in Israel, the official leadership of religious Jews of all stripes is firmly entrenched in the right — and their followers tend to vote as a bloc.
The hundreds of Orthodox Jews at the conference hope to change that dynamic, and have already started doing so by showing up en masse — and to applause — at the anti-government protests that have swept the country since the beginning of the year. But while their list of goals is long, they are also taking time to appreciate the unusual experience of being together.
A view of the attendees at the first meeting of Smol Emuni, the Faithful Left, in Jerusalem shows many kippahs — typically not associated with left-wing politics in Israel. (Photo by Gilad Kavalerchik)
“Just being in a room and realizing I’m not the only one like me was amazing,” attendee Shira Attias told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “The main takeaway for members of this niche and controversial group [is] to feel on their skin that they are not alone.”
Nitsan Machlis, a student and activist, agreed. “I’ve never seen so many people in a room together with whom I felt like I can identify with both religiously and politically.”
The conference took place inside the Heichal Shlomo synagogue, located adjacent to Jerusalem’s Great Synagogue at the same intersection as Israel’s prime minister’s official residence — a symbolic spot at the heart of Israel’s religious center.
“The fact that it was in Heichal Shlomo is quite significant because it’s a very Orthodox place,” said Ittay Flescher, educational director of an Israeli-Palestinian youth organization who attended the event. “It was chosen intentionally as an iconic Orthodox place, a place where Torah learning happens.”
That’s meaningful because members of the new government have disparaged critics of its policy moves as being anti-religious and opposed to Torah values.
According to haredi activist Pnina Pfeuffer, a member of the steering committee of Smol Emuni, which means faithful left in Hebrew, the conference was driven by the idea that leftwing values are an integral part of being Jewish.
“We’re not left-wing despite being religious, it’s part of how we practice our religious beliefs,” said Pfeuffer, who serves as the CEO of New Haredim, an umbrella organization for haredi education and women’s rights groups.
Organizer Mikhael Manekin, a veteran anti-occupation activist and religious Zionist, referred to it as a “very frum” conference, using the Yiddish word for the religiously devoted. Speakers heavily referenced both Jewish texts and previous generations of rabbis, such as Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who famously ruled it permissible under religious law to surrender land for peace, and the Lithuanian scion, Rabbi Elazar Shach, who likewise supported Jewish withdrawal from the Palestinian territories if it meant preserving Jewish life. (Rabbanit Adina Bar-Shalom, Yosef’s iconoclastic oldest daughter, was among the conference speakers.)
Rabbanit Adina Bar-Shalom, the eldest daughter of former Israeli Sephardic chief rabbi Ovadia Yosef, addresses the conference of religious leftists in Jerusalem, Jan. 25, 2023. (Photo by Gilad Kavalerchik)
“All of us understand there can’t be activism without religious study,” said Manekin, who runs the Alliance Fellowship, a network of Jewish and Arab political and civic leaders.
While Judaism is not a pacifist religion per se, there is a central theme in rabbinic literature of virtue ethics and an emphasis for caring for the weak on the one hand, he said, and a skepticism towards violence and power on the other. “Our role is to second-guess anything with power.”
According to Manekin, the current brand of religious Zionism and ultra-Orthodoxy’s “very recent” move to the right are emulating secular nationalist ethics a lot more than they are Jewish traditions.
“When somebody like [National Security Minister Itamar] Ben-Gvir says, ‘We’re the landlords’ and ‘I run the show,’ that for me is a very non-traditional Jewish way of looking at the world,” he said.
“The immediacy with which we accept the current militantism of the religious right, when there are such clear rabbinic texts which don’t allow for that kind of behavior is insane,” he said. “The idea that Jews can walk around with guns on Shabbat is much more of a reform than the idea that Jews should support peace.”
The ambition around peace has set the faithful left apart from the wider anti-government protests, which have not focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A week after the conference, a Palestinian terror attack outside a Jerusalem synagogue that took the lives of seven residents after the Shabbat service put these beliefs to a test.
But Manekin said such events — another attack followed this week — would not change his worldview. “Our tradition is [that] the response to death is mourning and repenting. The political response shouldn’t be based on revenge but on what we think is for the betterment of our people,” he said after the Neve Yaakov attack.
Constant applause and cheers for our group of religious protesters, marching to join main event in Tel Aviv. pic.twitter.com/ohFMwpCeGc
— Hannah Katsman | חנה כצמן (@mominisrael) January 28, 2023
Despite hesitations from his co-organizers, Manekin was adamant about labeling the conference “left,” because, he said, among the fringes of the religious community is “a large group of people who are tired of this constant obfuscation of our opinions to appease the right who are never appeased anyway.”
According to Flescher, the left in Israel is no longer relevant “because it can’t speak the Jewish language.” Religious people often feel like the left is “foreign, and alien and even Christian in some regard,” he said.
One of the goals moving forward, Pfeuffer said, is to develop a religious leftwing language.
But as the conference demonstrated, even under the banner of the religious left lies a broad range of opinions. As Flescher put it: “The religious left is much more diverse than the secular left.”
Attias, who wears a headscarf for religious reasons, described herself thus: “I’m very progressive and I live in the settlements.”
Even though she is “very left economically,” Attias said, she refuses to label herself as a leftist because she remains “extremely critical” of the left which she says is often “very removed from Palestinians and poverty” and the issues it purports to champion.
Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger, a coexistence activist who lives in the West Bank settlement of Alon Shvut, described his experience at the conference on Facebook. “I have rarely felt so at home and so comfortable in a sea of kippot in Israel,” he wrote, alluding to the fact that in Israel, the style and presence of one’s head covering is widely seen as indicative of his or her religious orientation and politics alike.
The conference did not shy away from raising hot-button topics that not everyone in the room saw eye to eye on. “Because we tried to include as much of a left-wing range of opinions as we could, everyone at some point felt a little bit uncomfortable,” Pfeuffer said, noting that there was an LGBTQ circle and even references to “apartheid” by one speaker, Orthodox female rabbi Leah Shakdiel.
“If you’re very comfortable then you’re probably not learning something new,” Pfeuffer said.
One thing that made the conference stand out from other leftwing gatherings was the sense of hope and optimism.
“The general mood from punditry on the liberal left is all doom and gloom,” Manekin said.
The atmosphere at the conference, on the other hand, was “emotionally uplifting, energizing, and proactive,” he said. “This feeling of ‘we now have an assignment’ is very indicative of religious communities in general. That feeling that once you congregate, you can actually do quite a lot.”
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The post In synagogues and on the streets, Israel’s new ‘faithful left’ is making itself felt appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Boulder hostage-march firebombing suspect to plead guilty to state charges
(JTA) — The man charged with firebombing a Boulder, Colorado, march for Israeli hostages in 2025 will plead guilty to killing one person and attempting to kill others in the incident, according to documents filed in the case over the weekend.
Mohamed Sabry Soliman, who was arrested at the scene of the June 1, 2025, attack, is asking for his ex-wife and children to be able to remain in the United States as a condition of his guilty plea, according to the documents.
His ex-wife and five children, like him all Egyptian nationals who came to the United States in 2022 via Kuwait, were arrested by immigration authorities shortly after the attack. They were detained until Thursday, when they were released from a detention center in Texas, then briefly detained again on Saturday in Boulder and, their attorneys say, put onto a plane bound for Egypt before being freed once again. His ex-wife, whom he divorced in April, has not been charged with a crime and said she did not know about Soliman’s planned attack.
Soliman is reportedly pleading guilty to all state charges but still faces federal charges in relation to the attack, which he allegedly said he staged to “wanted to kill all Zionist people and wished they were all dead,” according to an earlier court filing. He has previously pleaded not guilty to the federal charges, for which prosecutors could seek the death penalty.
Thirteen people were physically injured in the attack, which took place on a pedestrian mall in downtown Boulder where supporters of the Israelis then held hostage in Gaza marched weekly. One, 82-year-old Karen Diamond, died weeks later of her injuries.
The post Boulder hostage-march firebombing suspect to plead guilty to state charges appeared first on The Forward.
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Her body has been unidentified for decades. Her Ashkenazi DNA may explain why
Murder investigators in Arizona are encountering a stubborn obstacle to solving a decades-old cold case involving an unidentified dead body: The woman’s Ashkenazi Jewish DNA.
In 1989, an unclothed dead body was found on the side of a highway in northwest Arizona. The woman was never identified, though small details offered clues about her life: red nail polish on her fingers and toes, faux diamond stud earrings, and a handmade floral blouse found under a nearby tree.
The woman appeared to have been beaten, found with a broken nose and possible hematoma on the left side of her skull, though the medical examiner did not determine a cause of death. An autopsy determined the woman was between 25 and 30 years old.
In 2021, authorities reopened the case and uploaded the woman’s DNA profile to genetic databases available to law enforcement, hoping for a breakthrough. Instead, they hit a wall.
“Investigators learned that the victim was 96% Ashkenazi Jew, which made it extremely difficult to trace her ancestry and locate family members,” the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.
Ashkenazi Jews who try to track down relatives through genetic testing are familiar with the problem that the sheriff encountered: DNA testing, usually a powerful tool for finding relatives, often does not yield usable results for them.
Adina Newman, a professional genealogist and co-founder of the Holocaust Reunion Project, which uses DNA testing to help connect Holocaust survivors and their relatives to lost family, says two factors explain why genetic testing has limited use for many Jews. One is what’s known as the founder effect, when a population can be traced back to a small number of ancestors — as few as 350 people in Ashkenazi Jews’ case. The other is endogamy, the practice of marrying within a community over many generations.
As a result, a person with 100% Ashkenazi DNA can have more than 200,000 DNA matches in popular genetic databases, according to Newman. From such a large pool, it can be difficult to pinpoint close relatives.
“Ashkenazi Jews are all DNA cousins. But am I going to find it meaningful in a [family] tree?” Newman said. “Mostly no. We’ve just kind of accepted that it convolutes things.”
Investigators, however, aren’t giving up. The Mohave County Sheriff’s Office enlisted the help of the Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center at Ramapo College in New Jersey, which last week released an artistic rendering of what the woman may have looked like based on her remains.
“This doesn’t mean that cases of Ashkenazi Jews are impossible to solve,” David Gurney, director of the Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center, told the Forward. “It just is going to take a lot more effort.”
Jewish Jane Does
The 1989 case in Arizona is not the only time Ashkenazi DNA has posed a challenge in identifying remains. Another active case, an Ashkenazi Jewish woman whose dead body was found in 1981 in Olympia, Washington, remains unsolved.
Other cases have taken years to crack. In 2024, investigators working with the DNA Doe Project finally identified the body of a Jewish woman found murdered in a California vineyard in 2011 as Ada Beth Kaplan. It also took more than a decade to identify Mitchell Mendelson, a Jewish man whose body was found in a wooded area near his home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 2012.
In both cases, the deceased’s Ashkenazi DNA made the process more laborious for investigators, though DNA also eventually led investigators to be able to make the identifications.
To be sure, Ashkenazi Jews are not the only population that exhibits endogamy, which is also common among Pennsylvania Dutch communities, Icelanders, French Canadians and other tight-knit societies.
But the combination of Ashkenazi Jews’ genetic overlap and a complex historical record can make Jewish identification especially difficult cases to crack, Newman said.
For instance, in Newman’s own family, records changed from listing Vilna as being located in Russia, then Poland, then Belarus over a short period of time. But her family members hadn’t moved; the borders were changing around them. Last names in her family were also altered to sound more anglicized.
“You have to know these things. And it’s hard because a lot of genetic genealogists, even the best ones, are not familiar with that,” Newman said, “They need people who understand the Jewish genealogy aspect.”
Even when genealogists have such expertise, limited data can slow progress. Lingering trauma from the Holocaust has made some Jews hesitant to upload their DNA to public databases, Newman said.
Others have privacy concerns: In 2024, 23andMe settled a class-action lawsuit for $30 million in which customers accused the company of failing to notify customers with Ashkenazi Jewish heritage that they appeared to have been specifically targeted by hackers, who sold their information on the dark web.
Yet unless they have a search warrant, law enforcement agencies are constrained to cross-referencing DNA profiles with just two databases: GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA, which collectively host about 3 million profiles. By contrast, Ancestry.com has more than 29 million DNA profiles, according to its website, and 23andMe has roughly 15 million.
Ancestry.com and 23andMe users who wish to make their profile visible to researchers can upload their information to GEDMatch or FamilyTreeDNA for free.
“We always depend on members of the public taking consumer genetic genealogy tests to solve any case,” Gurney said. “That’s even more important in cases of endogamy here.”
Those challenges compelled Rabbi Mendel Super, who leads Chabad of Lake Havasu City in Mojave County, Arizona — about an hour’s drive away from where the woman’s body was found in 1989 — to spread the word about the case in the Jewish community. After Super learned of the woman’s Jewish ancestry, he contacted the local sheriff’s department to offer his help.
He’s since connected authorities with experts in Jewish genealogy and is publicizing the case on social media, hoping his Jewish network can help identify a relative.
“There’s millions of people who it could be, but there’s only a few million Jews in the world, and fewer in this country,” Super told the Forward. “So I think there’s got to be someone who knows something.”
Newman, too, sees broader participation as key. She encourages Jews to share their DNA profiles, noting that researchers view far less information than many expect — just the amount of shared DNA needed to construct family trees, not a complete genetic profile. People can even upload DNA profiles anonymously, she said, giving researchers the option to contact them only if there’s a notable match.
“These people deserve dignity, to have their names,” Newman said. “It could really be you, especially in the Jewish community. You could be the one that helps solve the case and gives us her name back.”
The post Her body has been unidentified for decades. Her Ashkenazi DNA may explain why appeared first on The Forward.
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Israeli Restaurant Owned by Syrian Repeatedly Attacked in Germany
Illustrative: Graffiti reading “Kill All Jews” was discovered on a residential building in Berlin-Pankow on April 26, 2026, part of a wave of antisemitic vandalism reported across the German capital over the past week, including swastikas and other hate-filled slogans scrawled on multiple sites. Photo: Screenshot
An Israeli restaurant in Germany has been repeatedly attacked while its Syrian Kurdish owner has been subjected to relentless harassment, underscoring a broader climate of hostility faced by Jews and Israelis across the country.
Restaurant owner Billal Aloge, a Muslim from Syria, has been subjected to escalating hatred and violence after publicly expressing support for Jewish life in his city by opening restaurants aimed at fostering dialogue and coexistence.
Shortly after opening his Israeli restaurant “Jaffa” in Freiburg, a city in western Germany, Aloge faced immediate hostility and a wave of online abuse.
Even after filing multiple police reports, the harassment did not stop, with unknown individuals continuing to target the restaurant. This included incidents of vandalism such as throwing rotten eggs at the premises, prompting the owner to repeatedly seek police intervention.
Then last Tuesday, the restaurant’s newly deployed food truck was vandalized after being parked for just a single day in Colombipark in the heart of the university town, according to German media.
The food truck was extensively damagd, with paint thrown across its exterior, Israeli symbols defaced with Palestinian flag stickers and antisemitic slogans, and its door kicked so forcefully that it was left visibly dented.
Three days later, Aloge and his wife were preparing to open the food truck for Labor Day, when they discovered a broken side mirror.
“The food truck was brand new. I bought it for the new season and had it lovingly refurbished,” Aloge told the German newspaper Bild.
“Once again, I had to file a police report and now I estimate the total damage from the two attacks at approximately 30,000 euros,” he continued.
Freiburg Mayor Martin Horn strongly condemned the attacks, stressing that the city would not tolerate such acts of hatred and would take them seriously, with full efforts to ensure accountability and protection for those targeted.
“There is no place in Freiburg for antisemitism, anti-Muslim racism, or any other form of hatred and incitement,” the German official said in a statement.
Like most countries across Europe and the broader Western world, Germany has seen a shocking rise in antisemitic incidents over the last two years, in the wake of the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
According to recently released figures, the number of antisemitic offenses in the capital city Berlin reached a record high in 2025, totaling 2,267 incidents, including violence, incitement, property damage, and propaganda offenses.
By comparison, officially recorded antisemitic crimes were significantly lower at 1,825 in 2024, 900 in 2023, and fewer than 500 in 2022, prior to the Oct. 7 atrocities.
Officials warn that the real number of antisemitic crimes is likely much higher, as many incidents go unreported.
In one of the latest antisemitic incidents in the country, a synagogue in Cottbus, a city in eastern Germany, was defaced with a swastika painted on its facade, marking the second time in just four days that the Jewish house of worship had been vandalized.
Separately, authorities also discovered antisemitic graffiti across several apartment buildings in Berlin-Pankow, including messages reading “Kill all Jews,” a swastika, and the statement “Only a dead Jew is a good Jew,” in a series of disturbing incidents over the week.