Israel announced Tuesday it had received the remains of IDF soldier Itay Chen, the youngest and last of six American citizens held hostage in Gaza during the Israel-Hamas war.

Staff Sgt. Chen, 19, was serving in a tank unit Oct. 7 when he was killed at the Nahal Oz military base. Hamas militants then took his body to Gaza, along with Matan Angrest and the remains of Capt. Daniel Perez and Sgt. Tomer Leibovitz. Chen was one of 53 IDF soldiers killed and 10 captured at Nahal Oz that day, and one of two American-Israeli soldiers killed that day.

Angrest was returned in an exchange as part of last month’s ceasefire agreement. The remains of the other American-Israeli soldier, Omer Neutra, were returned to Israel earlier this week.

For months after Oct. 7, Chen’s family held out hope he had been taken alive to Gaza, and his parents, Ruby and Hagit Chen, were among the most outspoken members of the hostage families — and became prominent critics of Israeli  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the war dragged on.

Ruby walked out of Netanyahu’s Sept. 2025 speech to the U.N. after the prime minister, listing the hostages by name, only recited the ones still alive.

“Is he subtly admitting that he is no longer focused on bringing everyone home?” Ruby Chen wrote later in a blog post. “Is he saying that each individual hostage is no longer important?”

Itay Chen was born in New York and grew up in Netanya.

The post Itay Chen, last remaining American hostage in Gaza, returned to Israel appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — Jamie Field was still a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College in New York City when she watched the first season of “Squid Game: The Challenge” and saw a call to action flash across the screen: “Could this be you? Apply now.”

It was 2023, and Field, who had long gravitated toward other reality television shows like “Survivor” and “The Amazing Race,” said she saw something deeply Jewish in them.

“The really beautiful thing about these shows is that when you’re in such a pressure cooker, for me, it’s not about the challenges, although those are fun to watch, but it’s about watching people be people and make mistakes and grow and foster connections between one another, and I’ve found so much Torah in these moments,” Field said in an interview. “I know it’s very rabbi to say.”

Two years later, Field is bringing that approach to the Netflix show’s second season, which premiered Tuesday. She was chosen to be one of over 456 contestants from around the world competing in a series of physical and mental challenges for a $4.56 million prize.

While Jewish contestants have competed on a number of reality TV shows, ordained rabbis have been rarer. Field said she went into the experience feeling a weighty responsibility around portraying Jewish clergy even as she was shackled to a team of players and competed in a relay race of mini games like stacking a house of cards and swinging a ball on a string into a cup. 

“I never expected to be the very best of the challenges,” she said. “I’ve always said, I have a heart of gold, but I’m not very dexterous, and so for me, it was about trying my best and giving it my all, and also trying to be true to myself and bringing my values and wisdom and sense of community and representing the rabbinate as best I could into the show.”

Field grew up in Los Angeles and where her family attended Temple Ahavat Shalom, a Reform congregation in the San Fernando Valley.

After graduating from Boston University in 2017, she worked for the Washington Hebrew Congregation, a Reform synagogue in Washington D.C., before enrolling at HUC in 2019, spending her first year in Jerusalem.

After being ordained in 2024, Field began working as the director of education at Beth El Temple Center, a Reform synagogue in Belmont, Massachusetts.

Just four months later, she received a call back from “Squid Game: The Challenge’ asking her if she was still interested. She was soon on her way to London for an extended break for filming.

A year later, in a post on Instagram announcing her appearance on the show, Field said her experience reminded her of what she has learned from Jewish tradition.

“I often share that the Torah is a sacred story of people being people — of being hurt, of making mistakes, of building connections, of adventure, and of finding the divine in it all,” she said. “I felt this so deeply during my experience on Squid Game.”

Among her co-competitors was a NFL cheerleader, a former bomb technician and an Anglican priest with whom Field said she connected on set.

“I had a really good conversation about religion and what it means to sort of be a faith leader on the show with the priest,” said Field. “I actually found that I had conversations about faith with almost everyone I talked to because, you know, people bring things up when you tell them you’re a rabbi.”

The post From the bimah to ‘Squid Game’: A rabbi finds Torah in unexpected places appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — An Arizona man who sent hundreds of threatening messages to a Jewish-owned hotel in New York City was sentenced to 49 months in prison on Thursday in federal court.

Donovan Hall, 35, of Mesa, Arizona, pleaded guilty to making interstate threats and interstate stalking of the Jewish owners of the Historic Blue Moon Hotel in Manhattan. He was also sentenced to three years of supervised release.

The Blue Moon Hotel is “dedicated to Jewish community in every way that we can be,” Randy Settenbrino said in an interview last year from his hotel, which includes rooms named for icons of the Jewish Lower East Side, a kosher cafe and a mural depicting 2,000 years of Jewish history.

At the time, Settenbrino and his employees had just begun to get what prosecutors said were nearly 1,000 threatening messages from Hall. Sent between August and November 2024, the messages threatened to “torture, mutilate, rape, and murder them and their families,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.

In October, Hall texted photographs of two firearms and a machete to one of his victims, writing, “I’ve got something for you and your inbred children” and “for the Zionist cowards,” according to his federal indictment.

“Donovan Hall targeted Jewish victims with a sustained campaign of intimidation, terror, and harassment,” said U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton in a statement.  “The approximately 1,000 threats he sent to these New Yorkers were alarming and brazen.”

Hall’s messages coincided with a boycott campaign against the hotel launched after Settenbrino’s son, an Israeli soldier, was identified as having posted videos of shooting at destroyed buildings and detonating bombs in homes and a mosque in Gaza.

Hall, who has been held at New York’s Metropolitan Detention Center since his arrest last year, apologized for his actions in a sentencing submission to the court, writing that he “wanted to champion for a cause and hunt down the bullies, not realizing that it was me the whole time.”

In an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency after Hall’s sentencing, Settenbrino said “baby killer” had been spray painted on the windows of his hotel, and flyers were posted around Manhattan calling for its boycott and referring to his son, Bram, as a “war criminal.”

“We’re sitting at a pivotal time in New York City, where we’re feeling the encroachment of hate and antisemitism in the West, like our brethren are feeling it in Europe, and so it’s very scary for everyone concerned,” said Settenbrino. “It’s very important that there are strong sentences handed out to this, not just for us, but for klal yisrael [the Jewish people] in general.”

The post Arizona man sentenced to 4 years in prison for antisemitic threats to Jewish NYC hotel owner appeared first on The Forward.