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Jewish institutions awaken to climate crisis, with hundreds pledging action
(JTA) — For a decade starting in 2002, Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi devoted herself to pro-Israel advocacy. After that, the Jewish philanthropist and activist from Annapolis, Maryland, went all in to fight for disability rights, working in the field for the next decade. Now, Mizrahi is focused on climate change.
“Let me put it this way: In 2021, we donated to one climate organization, and in 2022, we donated to 17 of them,” Mizrahi said, referring to the small charity fund she runs with her husband, tech entrepreneur Victor Mizrahi. This year, the couple made their largest climate-related donation yet, sending a group of nine climate reporters to Israel to meet tech startups working on ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Mizrahi and her husband have also begun commercially investing in such startups.
“I was hoping other people would solve it,” she said. “But the pace of the change is not nearly meeting the demand at the moment. I felt that even though I don’t know the subject, I’m just going to have to do it because I have kids and I don’t want this world to fall apart.”
Climate change has long ranked at or near the top of a list of issues concerning Jews in the United States, according to multiple surveys, and Jews have been heavily involved in the wider climate movement. But until recently, the issue had a marginal place on the agendas of Jewish communal organizations, which neglected climate even as the subject took on importance in the activism and policies of other religious communities and in the larger philanthropic world.
Mizrahi’s newfound emphasis on climate is an early example of a larger shift that is underway in Jewish philanthropy, a multibillion-dollar world made up of thousands of individual donors, charitable foundations and nonprofit organizations.
“It’s the beginning of what will become a more widespread focus among Jewish groups,” said Rabbi Jennie Rosenn, the founder and CEO of the Jewish climate group Dayenu. “We’re seeing an awakening to this as a profoundly Jewish issue, and awakening to the role that the Jewish community has to play in addressing the climate crisis.”
Scientists say that decisions regarding carbon emissions made in the next few years will affect life on Earth for thousands of years to come. The most recent warning came in March, when leading global experts with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a new report, stating that “there is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.”
The large Jewish populations living in the coastal United States are vulnerable to extreme storms, sea-level rise, severe heat and other weather disruptions — a situation dramatized in the recent Apple television series “Extrapolations,” in which a rabbi contends with rising sea waters infiltrating his Florida synagogue. Meanwhile, Israel is experiencing a slew of impacts from drought and floods to security threats tied regional climate-related instability.
A flooded road after heavy rainfall in the central Israeli city of Lod, Jan. 16, 2022. (Yossi Aloni/Flash90)
Israeli officials visit the site where a road collapsed into a large sinkhole at Mineral Beach in the Dead Sea on December 7, 2017. Many facilities and beaches have been closed or shut down in recent years following the increase in sinkholes caused by ever-declining sea levels, as climate change strains the country’s water resources. (Mark Neyman/GPO)
The last few months have seen a flurry of new initiatives aimed at both greening Jewish institutions and directing collective action on climate.
In December, for example, Rosenn’s group published a report calculating that endowments of Jewish organizations, from family foundations to local federations, are invested in the fossil fuel industry to the tune of at least $3 billion. The report launched an ongoing campaign called All Our Might that urges Jewish leaders to withdraw these investments and put the money toward clean energy instead.
Meanwhile, many of the most prominent Jewish organizations in the country — representing local federations, Hillel chapters, summer camps, community centers, day schools and nearly every religious denomination — had already joined a new green coalition organized by another Jewish environmental group and were preparing to unveil pledges to do more in the fight against climate change.
The unveiling of the climate pledges happened in March, under the leadership of Adamah, a nonprofit created through the merger of two stalwarts of Jewish environmentalism, Hazon and the Pearlstone Center.
“Climate and sustainability have not been on the list of priorities for the vast majority of Jewish organizations; this coalition and these climate action plans reflect a deep paradigm shift and culture change moving forward,” Adamah CEO Jakir Mandela said at the time.
The commitments made by members of Adamah’s Jewish Climate Leadership Coalition include sending youth leaders to global climate summits, reducing emissions of buildings and vehicles and lobbying the federal government to pass climate policies.
More than 300 congregations and nonprofits have joined. For Earth Day, Adamah announced a million-dollar fund offering interest-free loans and matching grants to Jewish groups for projects to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
If any single event can be said to mark the debut of the climate issue as a top Jewish communal priority, it is probably the recent annual conference of the Jewish Funders Network, which took place in March in Phoenix, bringing together thousands of donors and charity executives.
For the gathering’s first event, before the formal opening of the conference, a group of participants went on a field trip to downtown Phoenix to learn about the local effects of the climate crisis. Far more people signed up than organizers anticipated, and with about 55 passengers, the tour bus chartered for the occasion reached capacity. Mizrahi, who was among the participants, said the trip was helpful as a networking opportunity for like-minded philanthropists.
“We wanted to expose them to how the existential threats posed by climate change are not long term, but are already here,” Yanklowitz said. “People down in the Zone are dying every summer from heat exhaustion and dehydration.”
Based on his debrief with the group afterward, Yanklowitz feels the trip left an impact on participants.
“I didn’t hear anyone say, ‘Oh, I’m changing my commitments.’ But I did get the sense that climate change was kind of abstract for many people, and that now it really hit home,” Yanklowitz said.
The rest of the conference featured multiple talks and gatherings dedicated to climate, including on the main stage, and an announcement that Birthright, which offers free trips to Israel for young Jews, was increasing its own climate activism with the help of a new donation.
In an interview, Ellen Bronfman Hauptman and Stephen Bronfman, children of Birthright founder Charles Bronfman, said their $9 million gift is meant to honor their father on the occasion of his 90th birthday, while also bringing Birthright more in line with the values of a new generation that is environmentally-minded.
Birthright organizers will use the funding to develop programming focused on climate that could, for example, expose participants to Israel’s clean tech scene. The money is also intended to help Birthright lower its own carbon footprint, potentially by switching to electric buses or adding more vegetarian meals.
The Bronfmans hope that Birthright’s significant purchasing power in Israeli tourism will nudge the industry toward more ecologically sustainable practices.
“To me, Birthright is like Walmart — everyone wants to do business with them,” Stephen Bronfman said. “They have the power to dictate terms to their service providers and affect the supply chain.”
The widespread interest in climate mobilization among Jewish groups comes after years in which the issue languished outside the mainstream. Rosenn, the head of Dayenu, who has attended about 15 conferences of the Jewish Funder Network, noticed a change this year.
“There used to be half a dozen people at a breakfast before the program talking about climate. And it wasn’t even climate, necessarily — it was the environment writ large,” she said.
The Jewish world is, in many ways, still lagging behind the larger climate movement. Divesting endowment funds from the fossil fuel industry, for example, is seen as a bold step among Jewish groups even though at least 1,590 institutions representing nearly $41 trillion in assets have already publicly committed to doing so, according to a website tracking such pledges. About a third of the groups on the list are defined as faith-based organizations, but only three are Jewish: Kolot Chayeinu, a congregation in Park Slope, Brooklyn; the Reform movement’s pension system; and the American Jewish World Service, a global justice group.
Rabbi Laura Bellows, now Dayenu’s director of spiritual activism and education, waves matzah as she encourages major financial organizations to divest from fossil fuels at a rally in Washington, D.C., April 20, 2022. (Bora Chung | Survival Media Agency / Courtesy of Dayenu)
Adamah’s own climate plan doesn’t include a pledge to divest but only a promise that it will investigate the option of doing so for its endowment and employee retirement funds. Instead, the plan touts the group’s education and advocacy efforts, and focuses on reducing emissions at its retreat centers.
Adamah’s chief climate officer, Risa Alyson Cooper, acknowledged that Jewish community institutions have been “largely absent” from the divestment movement and said her group regards divestment as one of several required tools for addressing the climate crisis.
She said the Jewish community hit a milestone when 12 of the 20 founding members of Adamah’s climate coalition said in their climate plans that they would consider amending their financial practices. That was significant, she said, in light of the organizations’ complex and deliberate governing structures, which can make executing such changes onerous.
“While the Jewish community may have lagged behind in years past, we are catching up quickly,” Cooper said.
Such a shift would mark not only a milestone for Jewish climate activism but also a departure from how the Jewish community has historically done philanthropy, said Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster, executive vice president of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility.
She said wielding financial holdings for social impact has been a hallmark of advocacy by Christian groups. Last year, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) opted to divest from fossil fuels in light of the climate crisis.
The Jewish community, meanwhile, has tended to act primarily through charitable donations. One of the reasons for the difference, she said, is that the Jewish community is much less centralized with communal assets spread across many endowments, making the actions of any single group relatively less impactful.
“Adamah had done some really important work to change individual behavior and grow people’s connections to the environment, but the bigger piece of bold collective action to fight the climate crisis was missing,” Kahn-Troster said. “The overall community is late to respond to the urgency of the problem. But I do think that the work of these organizations is very significant, so I’m excited to see it.”
Kahn-Troster’s historical view is informed by the legacy of her father, Rabbi Lawrence Troster, an environmental activist who had pushed for communal Jewish action on climate, and by the passion for climate justice displayed by her 15-year-old, Liora Pelavin, a member of the Jewish Youth Climate Movement, an arm of Adamah.
“Finding a meaningful Jewish space to do grassroots-level climate advocacy that many young people are demanding has been really important to Liora,” Kahn-Troster said.
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Canadian progressive party picks Jewish anti-Zionist politician as its leader
(JTA) — Canada’s main progressive party aims to make a comeback under its new leader Avi Lewis, a Jewish anti-Zionist.
Lewis, a filmmaker and former journalist, was elected to lead the New Democrats on Sunday. He campaigned on principles that have energized the global left, including affordability, the environment and unapologetic anti-Zionism. He repeated his position on Israel in his acceptance speech in Winnipeg.
“When Israel commits a genocide in Gaza, we call it by its name, and we do everything in our power to bring it to an end,” Lewis said in his speech.
Lewis hopes to rebuild a party that suffered its worst losses in history during the 2025 federal election. Center-left voters who were alarmed by President Donald Trump’s threats to Canada flocked to the Liberal Party and elected Mark Carney as prime minister.
Lewis comes from a line of progressive royalty. His grandfather, David Lewis, was one of the founding members of the New Democrats and its leader in the 1970s. His father, Stephen Lewis, led the party in Ontario. He is also the great-grandson of Moishe Lewis, who was an outspoken member of the socialist Jewish Labour Bund in Eastern Europe and immigrated to Canada in 1921.
Lewis is married to Naomi Klein, a prominent author and critic of Israel. Klein was among several writers who declined to participate in PEN America’s annual World Voices festival in 2024, saying the group failed to “stand firmly” with Palestinian writers. She also addressed protesters during a rally outside U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s residence in Brooklyn during Passover that year, called “Seder in the Streets to Stop Arming Israel,” and urged Jews against worshipping the “false idol” of Zionism.
Lewis was formerly a reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Al Jazeera. In a debate with other candidates in January, he described himself as an “anti-Zionist Jewish person” seeking to “unlearn and unpack the Zionist myths that most Canadian Jews were brought up with.”
The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, an advocacy arm of the Jewish Federations of Canada, said it acknowledged Lewis’ victory “with a deep sense of sadness.”
“Avi Lewis is himself Jewish, and we respect his family’s history in this party,” the group said a statement. “But Jewish identity is not a shield against accountability. When a leader declares that Zionism is inseparable from ethnic cleansing, he is not engaging in legitimate policy critique. He is telling Jewish Canadians that a core part of their identity is illegitimate.”
On the eve of the New Democratic Party’s leadership convention, CIJA joined dozens of rabbis from across the country in an open letter criticizing the party.
“Too often, the NDP’s response to antisemitism in Canada has been inconsistent, hesitant, or clouded by rhetoric that fails to recognize how hatred manifests in today’s environment,” said the letter.
Perhaps anticipating Lewis’ victory, they added, “Even more troubling is the repeated elevation of fringe or non-representative Jewish voices to deflect, dilute, or dismiss the legitimate concerns of the vast majority of the Canadian Jewish community.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Canadian progressive party picks Jewish anti-Zionist politician as its leader appeared first on The Forward.
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Netanyahu orders Church of the Holy Sepulchre open after Palm Sunday closure flares tensions
(JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered that the top Catholic clergy in Israel be allowed into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre ahead of Easter, in an attempt to calm tensions that flared after police blocked their access.
Police cited wartime restrictions when prohibiting Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa and three other Catholic representatives from visiting the church, located in the Old City of Jerusalem, on Palm Sunday, a holy day for Christians.
Many holy sites in the city, including the Western Wall for Jews and al-Aqsa Mosque for Muslims, have been closed or tightly restricted since the start of the Iran war last month because they lack bomb shelters for the number of people who typically gather there. Shrapnel from Iranian missiles have landed in the Old City multiple times, including near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
But the prohibitions on Pizzaballa’s access come at a time when some Christians are expressing concern that Israel is discriminating against them. A statement from the Latin Patriarchate on Sunday accusing Israel of having made a “hasty and fundamentally flawed decision, tainted by improper considerations,” seemed to fuel those sentiments.
“For the first time in centuries, the Heads of the Church were prevented from celebrating the Palm Sunday Mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,” the Latin Patriarchate said. “This incident is a grave precedent and disregards the sensibilities of billions of people around the world who, during this week, look to Jerusalem.”
Christians believe that the church is the site of Jesus’ burial and resurrection, making prayers at the site on Palm Sunday, which kicks off the week leading up to Easter, particularly significant. Pizzaballa was seeking to pray privately at the site, not lead a major service as is typical.
Criticism over the closure resounded across the globe, including among allies of the Israeli government. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni condemned the closure as “an insult” and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee called it “difficult to understand or justify” given that wartime rules prohibit only gatherings of 50 or more.
Soon, Israeli authorities were negotiating a special arrangement that would allow Pizzaballa and a handful of other Christian leaders access to the holy sites without opening them widely. Israeli President Isaac Herzog said he called Pizzaballa personally to express his commitment to religious freedom.
“I reiterate the unwavering commitment of the State of Israel to the freedom of worship for people of all faiths and the importance of upholding the status quo at the holy sites in Jerusalem,” Herzog said in a statement.
For his part, Pizzaballa downplayed the incident when speaking to a Catholic news channel. “There were no clashes, and we don’t want to force matters, but rather figure out what to do while respecting the right to prayer,” he said. “There were misunderstandings, we didn’t understand each other, and that’s what happened. It’s never happened before; it’s a shame this happened. This morning’s events are important, but we must consider the broader context. There are people who are much worse off than us who cannot celebrate for very different reasons. Once again, we are celebrating a subdued Easter.”
The police said the closure was justified because in addition to the lack of bomb shelters in the Old City, the area’s narrow and winding streets make it hard for emergency vehicles to reach anyone who might be injured in an attack.
Netanyahu said that while he understood the safety considerations involved in turning Pizzaballa back on Sunday, he had called for changes going forward.
“I have instructed the relevant authorities that Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch, be granted full and immediate access to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem,” he said in a statement.
The dustup came as Pope Leo, in his Palm Sunday address in the Vatican, condemned the Iran war and lamented that Christians in the Middle East “are suffering the consequences of a brutal conflict and, in many cases, are unable to observe fully the liturgies of these holy days.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Netanyahu orders Church of the Holy Sepulchre open after Palm Sunday closure flares tensions appeared first on The Forward.
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While sculpting Jesus, this Jewish artist wrestled with his demons
You may not know the name Jimmy Grashow, but it’s likely you’ve seen his work. His psychedelic drawings have been featured in The New York Times, Ms. and Playboy. He illustrated album covers for The Yardbirds and Jethro Tull. His cardboard sculptures of people, animals and buildings have been shown all over the country, including at MoMA, the Library of Congress, and the San Jose Museum of Art. Within the first 30 seconds of Jimmy & the Demons, a documentary about the artist directed by Cindy Meehl, I recognized his cardboard sculptures of a dancing couple; a version lives in the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington in my home state of North Carolina.
The documentary follows Grashow as he works on his latest commission: an eight-foot tall wooden sculpture of Jesus hoisting a cathedral on his back, while demons, each one completely different from the other, reach out of the flames around his feet. The cathedral’s intricate exterior is matched by an equally elaborate interior: A mural of Eden decorates the cathedral wall and a figure resembling the piece’s commissioner Michael Marocco, a Catholic art collector who has several Grashow pieces in his private sculpture garden, kneels in prayer. If you look closely at the mural, you can see God’s name written in Hebrew on a painted banner. The cathedral’s stained glass windows are illuminated by an electric bulb.
Grashow’s work is painstakingly detailed and took years to complete, as the slightest error in measurement or cut could have ruined the whole thing. While the documentary doesn’t last for years the way the project did, it follows a similarly leisurely pace, spending lots of moments in silence with Grashow in his home workshop in Redding, Connecticut. It’s a close look at the mostly solitary work of an artist, although viewers also get a few moments to meet Grashow’s family, including his daughter who is a rabbi.
Meehl has profiled unconventional figures in her past documentaries, such as Buck, about horse whisperer Dan “Buck” Brannaman, and The Dog Doc, about holistic veterinarian Marty Goldstein. Grashow, who passed away in September 2025, three months after the film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, is no exception.
Despite his artistic talent, Grashow said that as a kid he “felt inadequate in every way.” Dyslexic and bad at math, Grashow struggled in his Brooklyn high school. At home, he felt overshadowed by his athletic brother and brilliant older sister. But he found a place to succeed at the Pratt Institute, where he studied woodworking, and received a Fulbright to study in Florence. There he fell in love with the cathedrals that would appear in many of his projects over the years.
Grashow did not view his sculpture of Christ as conflicting with his Jewish faith, noting the relationship between the word “Israel,” which means one who wrestles with God, and the meaning he saw in the piece.
“The world is full of peril and devils,” Grashow said. “And there you are trying to carry your faith and keep your faith alive. It’s a simple idea of trying to move forward in life with chaos and the possibility of chaos everywhere.”
“I’m wrestling all the time,” Grashow said. “It’s a brutal world.”
Grashow told the filmmakers that, when the idea for Marocco’s sculpture came to him, he “knew it was like a hineini moment,” using the term which means “here I am” and is also the name of a prayer traditionally chanted during the High Holidays, implying that one is showing up as their full self, with all of their flaws.
“It was God saying ‘Here’s this’ and it was up to me to say ‘Here I am. I’ll do it,’” Grashow said.
It was not a simple task. In addition to the years spent building the project, there was an emotional toll. Early in the film, Grashow says that the project feels like “the grand finale.” He asks that the filmmakers not share that information with his wife, Guzzy, although she later tells them herself that she feels Grashow’s time is running out.
Later in the film, the Museum Contemporary Art in Westport, Connecticut offers Grashow a retrospective exhibit of his work, with the new piece at the center. Grashow’s musings about death imbue the project with a sense of urgency and the proposed exhibit title is fittingly Man, Mortality: A Retrospective. However, when the museum refuses to fully fund the show, Grashow and Guzzy are left scrambling for a way to showcase his life’s work.
As Grashow wrestles with his own corporality, his art is both an escape from and an expression of his worries.
“When I’m doing demons, I know that it’s a little boy playing,” he said. “And an old man being terribly afraid.”
Jimmy & the Demons opens in New York at the Quad Cinema on April 3, 2026.
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