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Mayhem at Jewish Federations conference in Tel Aviv as protesters and panelists fight over judiciary and immigration
TEL AVIV (JTA) — A panel at a major American Jewish conference here descended into pandemonium as protesters in the audience shouted down a leading far-right politician.
Panelists also sniped at each other over the government’s controversial attempt to overhaul Israel’s judiciary and its threat to tighten immigration rules.
Security personnel forcibly ejected multiple protesters from the event, which took an unplanned five-minute break to calm the tensions in the room. It was the first reprimand of protesters at a conference whose organizers had made clear they expected them and supported any that did not interfere with the proceedings.
“We wanted very much to include anyone who wanted to be here, to learn and to be part of the conversation. It’s unfortunate it was disrupted so we couldn’t engage in the kind of learning we had hoped for,” Jewish Federations of North America board chair Julie Platt told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency after the interrupted panel. “It was more than we expected.”
The drama at the event surrounded Simcha Rothman, an Orthodox lawmaker who is one of the architects of, and a vocal advocate for, the government’s proposal to sap power from the Supreme Court. Protests against him on Monday began before his speaking engagement and followed him throughout his remarks.
Rothman is the most prominent advocate for the judicial overhaul to speak at the General Assembly, a conference taking place in Tel Aviv and organized by the Jewish Federations of North America. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was scheduled to speak at the conference’s opening on Sunday night but backed out hours earlier in the face of protests.
Monday morning’s events came about 12 hours after hundreds of protesters demonstrated outside the General Assembly’s opening event. Inside the conference kickoff on Sunday night, addressing the protesters, Platt said, “We see you, we hear you and we are inspired by your love of Israel.”
Rothman opted to come and met opposition in the conference’s halls almost immediately. While sitting with a reporter in the gathering’s breakfast area, a small gaggle of protesters arrived at his table and started chanting “shame” in Hebrew. One protester offered Rothman a bracelet bearing the word “democracy,” which has become the anti-government protests’ one-word slogan, and another yelled, “Rothman, go to hell.”
Some protesters were removed by security guards at the Jewish Federations of North America conference in Tel Aviv, April 24, 2023. (Ben Sales)
The protests intensified at the morning panel, which centered on proposals to change Israel’s Law of Return affording automatic citizenship to Jews, their children and grandchildren. Every time Rothman spoke, a group of protesters standing in a kind of informal ring around the room shouted him down with chants of “shame” and “liar,” in both Hebrew and English. Protesters on one side of the room held Israeli flags — another mainstay of the street protests — as well as an LGBTQ rainbow pride flag.
Multiple protesters were dragged out of the event by security — at least one of whom came back in and continued protesting. One yelled, “Rothman is destroying Israel, destroying our future! My kids! My kids!”
Rothman repeatedly had to pause his remarks and shot back at the protesters throughout his comments.
“What we see here is exactly the problem we need to address, a person that shouts ‘democracy’ while trying to shut up other people,” Rothman said after a protester shouted, “You’re an enemy of the Jewish people!” Rothman later said, “Some people are looking for consensus only when they’re in the opposition.”
The shouting was not limited to protesters in the audience. Rothman’s co-panelists were Yohanan Plesner, the president of the Israel Democracy Institute think tank, and Alex Rif, founder of the One Million Lobby, which advocates for Russian-speaking Israelis. Plesner objected in strong terms both to Rothman’s views on the Law of Return and to the judicial overhaul.
“The government came in with an agenda to fundamentally alter the fragile arrangements that existed for 75 years,” he said. “Somehow this balance was kept because the Supreme Court played a balancing role, and the Knesset and government respected that role.”
Rothman at one point suggested that Plesner join the protests and criticized him personally.
“The person that is the head of the Israeli Democratic Institution [sic] basically praises the idea that an undemocratic organization in Israel, powered in Israel, unelected… will make a decision that as we see are very tense,” Rothman said, referring to the Supreme Court. “Not the democratic body politic of the State of Israel, God forbid.”
Plesner responded by saying, “You’re misrepresenting what I said. Every democracy has an independent court that protects rights.”
Rothman responded, “They lied to you, they lied to the public in the U.S., they lied to the public in Israel.”
The panel’s stated topic, the Law of Return, also led to sharp disagreement. Rothman is in favor of making the law more restrictive by canceling the provision allowing the grandchild of a Jew to gain citizenship. The clause has allowed for a significant proportion of Israel’s Russian speakers to immigrate.
Rothman said the idea of canceling the clause “is not new, it’s not [originally] from this government, it’s to deal with the problem that arose … in the 90s,” when large numbers of Jews immigrated from the former Soviet Union. Because he said the change would mostly affect immigrants from eastern Europe, he suggested it shouldn’t be as concerning to American Jews and added, “Sadly, some people are trying to make this issue a split between American Jewry and Israeli Jewry in an unjustified way. We need to have this conversation and find a solution.”
Rif responded by accusing Rothman of telling Russian-speaking Israelis, ”You’re here by mistake.” She called on Israel to ease immigration for Jews from Russia and Belarus. In an explicit allusion to last century’s American Jewish activism on behalf of Soviet Jewry, which employed the slogan “Let my people go,” she brandished a sign onstage reading “Let my people in.”
Both Rif and Plesner drew cheers from the audience when they spoke.
“When you change the law of Return, you close the door for them forever for the Jewish people,” she said of Russian speakers already living in Israel. “You’re telling them, ‘We don’t want you here.’ Now, they’re living here for 30 years feeling second-class.”
Following particularly intense protests and onstage argument, Jewish Federations personnel called for a five-minute break. Protests against Rothman continued following the break, though the panel’s discussion continued. After the break, Plesner offered an olive branch of sorts to Rothman.
“I want to say, to Simcha Rothman’s credit, that he is a staunch ideologue. I disagree, almost, with everything he says, but he’s a staunch ideologue,” Plesner said. “Before the elections he said exactly what he’s going to promote. We sat together, and he said so.”
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San Diego Group Apologizes for Disinviting Rabbi From MLK Jr. Event Over ‘Safety Concerns,’ Pro-Israel Stance
The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, DC. Photo: Reuters / Allison Shelley.
Organizers of a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event in San Diego, California, have apologized for disinviting a rabbi from speaking due to his stance on the Israel-Hamas war and “safety concerns.”
Alliance San Diego made the apology in a released statement after receiving widespread criticism for its treatment of Rabbi Hanan Leberman, the leader of Tifereth Israel Synagogue in San Diego. He was originally scheduled to lead the closing prayer at the city’s 38th annual All Peoples Celebration at the Balboa Park Activity Center on Jan. 19.
In a description for the event, Alliance San Diego invited the public to “choose Courage; to decide, with intention, to do what is right even when the fear and opposition are loud. Now more than ever, our voices must rise above hesitation. We must claim our dignity and echo the notion that any attack on one, is an attack on us all.”
A day before the event, Leberman wrote in a Facebook post he was “deeply upset” to learn he had been disinvited from presenting at the ceremony because of his “connection to Israel.” Alliance San Diego claimed Leberman was instead invited to attend the program as a guest, but the rabbi said he ultimately decided not to attend the event at all.
The decision to disinvite Leberman from presenting at the event was condemned by a coalition of nearly four dozen community-based organizations, social service providers, and synagogues in a joint statement published on Jan. 18.
While apologizing for the move in a statement shared on Instagram, Alliance San Diego also explained its decision, saying that event organizers faced “major disruption over two speakers’ public stances on the conflict in Israel-Palestine.”
“We hear the community’s concern that this decision felt to some like an exclusion of Jewish identity echoing historical traumas and antisemitic patterns present in many public spaces today. This was not our intention, and we apologize for reinforcing this pattern,” the group said. “To protect the attendees at the celebration and keep the focus on Dr. King, we asked both speakers to attend as our guests instead of present on the program. Our decision was based solely on safety concerns and was communicated in person conversations with the speakers. We recognize, however, that intent does not erase impact, and we take responsibility for the hurt caused … A deep source of regret is that our missteps have distracted us from our core work of creating a San Diego that is safe for all people.”
Leberman was born in Chicago, raised in Philadelphia, and ordained as a rabbi in Israel, where he lived and worked before moving to San Diego, according to the website for Tifereth Israel Synagogue. He moved to Israel at the age of 20 and served three years in the undercover counter-terrorist unit Duvduvan of the Israel Defense Forces, often serving as the unit’s cantor. Leberman studied at the Jerusalem Academy of Music, and aside from being a cantor, he is also a professional opera singer. He served as a rabbi and cantor for the Masorti movement in Israel and led congregations as a guest cantor in Israel, England, and the United States.
Alliance San Diego said in an earlier statement that it asked two speakers to give up their speaking roles at the event “in response to concerns about potential disruption related to Zionism and anti-Zionism,” but noted they had not been disinvited. The other speaker was not publicly identified but also ultimately decided not to attend the event.
“At the time, we believed we were acting in the best interest of protecting attendees and preserving the spirit of the event,” the group said in its statement. “Our intention was never to exclude Jewish faith leaders or Jewish voices from this space. As an organization working across many communities under immense strain and confronting assaults on immigrant communities, including Jewish and Israeli immigrants at a time of rising antisemitism and fear, we acknowledge that our decision contributed to that pain rather than alleviating it.”
Leberman said in his Facebook post on Jan. 18 that disinviting him from speaking at the event “runs counter to Dr. King’s message — particularly at this moment in history, when Jews are experiencing the most significant rise in hate crimes of any group.”
“The decision to disinvite me is, in my view, a disservice to the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr,” he added. “I believe the organization would benefit from deeper education about what Zionism truly is and about what the Jewish community is facing today — from both the left and the right.”
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Jessica Tisch affixes a mezuzah to her NYPD office on International Holocaust Remembrance Day
Jessica Tisch, New York City’s Jewish police commissioner, on Tuesday affixed a mezuzah to the front doorframe of her office at One Police Plaza, a NYPD spokesperson told the Forward. The brief ceremony took place on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
A mezuzah, a small scroll containing the Shema and V’ahavta in a decorative case, traditionally marks a Jewish home or office as sacred and serves as a public expression of Jewish identity. Tisch made the blessing before putting up the scroll in the presence of a small group of uniformed and civilian Jewish members of the police force.
In a statement, Tisch called it “a small but meaningful symbol of faith and resilience” that affirms that “Jewish faith and tradition endure with strength and pride” after the Holocaust.
Tisch, 44, comes from one of the city’s most prominent Jewish families. The family name was originally Tichinsky when her ancestors immigrated to the United States from Ukraine in 1904, and it was later shortened as a nickname when her great-grandfather Avraham was cheered as a captain of the City College of New York’s basketball team. Her grandfather, Rabbi Philip Hiat, a Reform rabbi known for his interfaith work, served as a police chaplain in the New York City Housing Authority Police Department.
Tisch said on Tuesday that placing the mezuzah, which was purchased in Israel and given to her by her mother Merryl, at her office is a “reminder that in this city, every community belongs, and every identity deserves to be lived openly and without fear.”
✡️ EXCLUSIVE: Marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch affixed a mezuzah to the front doorframe of her office at One Police Plaza.
Details ⬇️https://t.co/94SYmxPyAg pic.twitter.com/NXcGjav16f
— Jacob N. Kornbluh (@jacobkornbluh) January 27, 2026
Tisch has spoken openly and proudly about her Judaism in public appearances. When Tisch was sworn in as NYPD commissioner in 2024, she wore a Star of David necklace to the ceremony. Last year she told second and third graders at Ramaz School about her leadership role, “You can be anything you want to be, whether you’re a woman, a mother, or an observant Jew.” Five of her deputies are also Jewish.
The police commissioner is widely respected in the Jewish community for her record on public safety and for her strong support of Israel. Tisch agreed to remain in her post under Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has come under growing scrutiny over his anti-Zionist worldview and his revocation of executive orders tied to antisemitism and pro-Palestinian protests.
According to a New York Times report, Tisch made the decision to work with Mamdani over a bowl of matzah ball soup during Shabbat dinner with her family
The post Jessica Tisch affixes a mezuzah to her NYPD office on International Holocaust Remembrance Day appeared first on The Forward.
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Pope Leo Says Catholic Church ‘Unwavering’ in Its Opposition to ‘Every Form of Antisemitism’
Pope Leo XIV holds a Jubilee audience on the occasion of the Jubilee of Sport, at St. Peter’s Basilica, at the Vatican June 14, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Yara Nardi
Pope Leo XIV on Tuesday marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day with a statement reaffirming the Catholic Church’s “unwavering” opposition to antisemitism.
“On Holocaust Remembrance Day, I would like to recall that the Church remains faithful to the unwavering position of the Declaration #NostraAetate against every form of antisemitism,” the pope posted on the X social media platform. “The Church rejects any discrimination or harassment based on ethnicity, language, nationality, or religion.”
On Holocaust Remembrance Day, I would like to recall that the Church remains faithful to the unwavering position of the Declaration #NostraAetate against every form of antisemitism. The Church rejects any discrimination or harassment based on ethnicity, language, nationality, or…
— Pope Leo XIV (@Pontifex) January 27, 2026
The post concluded with a link to Nostra Aetate, a declaration from the Second Vatican Council and promulgated on Oct. 28, 1965, by Pope Paul VI that called for dialogue and respect between Christianity and other religions. The theological reform called for a position of Christian-Jewish brotherhood, advocating “the bond that spiritually ties the people of the New Covenant to Abraham’s stock.”
Leo offered his message opposing antisemitism as the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating antisemitism released its newest research into global hate against Jews.
The report documents 815 “serious” incidents around the world — including 21 murders of Jews — as well as 124 million antisemitic X postings and more than 4,000 anti-Israel demonstrations.
“On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we are called not only to remember, but to act. The ministry stands alongside Jewish communities, monitors and collects information in real time, and pursues the perpetrators of antisemitism and hatred wherever they are,” Amichai Chikli, the Israeli minister of diaspora affairs and combating antisemitism, said in a statement.
Chikli urged a proactive strategy, arguing that “antisemitism is rising in various arenas – yet our responsibility is not to remain on the defensive, but to go on the offensive.”
Leo has repeatedly spoken out against antisemitism and promoted Nostra Aetate since he began his papacy last year.
In October, the pontiff condemned antisemitism and affirmed the Catholic Church’s commitment to combating hatred and persecution against the Jewish people, arguing his faith demands such a stance.
Speaking in St. Pete’s Square at the Vatican, Leo acknowledged the 60th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, saying, “I too confirm that the Church does not tolerate antisemitism and fights against it, on the basis of the Gospel itself.”
“This luminous document teaches us to meet the followers of other religions not as outsiders, but as traveling companions on the path of truth; to honor differences affirming our common humanity; and to discern, in every sincere religious search, a reflection of the one divine mystery that embraces all creation,” Leo continued.
He then added that the primary focus of Nostra Aetate was toward the Jewish people, explaining that Pope John XXIII, who preceded Paul VI, intended to “re-establish the original relationship.”
Nostra Aetate details the close bonds between Jews and Christians.
“The Church, therefore, cannot forget that she received the revelation of the Old Testament through the people with whom God in His inexpressible mercy concluded the Ancient Covenant,” the proclamation states. “Nor can she forget that she draws sustenance from the root of that well-cultivated olive tree onto which have been grafted the wild shoots, the Gentiles. Indeed, the Church believes that by His cross Christ, Our Peace, reconciled Jews and Gentiles making both one in Himself.”
The document also opposes antisemitism, proclaiming that “in her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel’s spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of antisemitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.”
Jewish leaders have expressed optimism for interfaith relations under Leo’s leadership.
Rabbi Noam Marans, director of interreligious affairs at the American Jewish Committee (AJC), told The Algemeiner in May that “his remarks to the Jewish people have actually been extraordinary.”
At the time, just after being elected to the papacy, Leo met with Jewish leaders and other faith representatives at the Vatican. “Because of the Jewish roots of Christianity, all Christians have a special relationship with Judaism,” he said during the meeting. “Even in these difficult times, marked by conflicts and misunderstandings, it is necessary to continue the momentum of this precious dialogue of ours.”
Before the beginning of Leo’s pontificate, Israeli-Vatican relations had come under strain due to the late Pope Francis’s statements about the war to defeat Hamas in Gaza, including his suggestion that the Jewish state was committing genocide.
There has been a recent rise in promoting antisemitism among some Catholic podcasters and social media influencers, especially on the political right. Nick Fuentes, for example, has praised Adolf Hitler and even called for the extermination of Jewish people from American civilization.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) wrote that Fuentes “frequently makes his support known for the Traditionalist Catholic view that rejects the Nostra Aetate, the papal document that declared that modern Jews bear no guilt for the death of Christ.”
The ADL revealed that in March 2024 on Telegram, “Fuentes wrote that he and his followers ‘rightly defend the traditional Catholic view,’ blaming Jews for ‘crucifying our Lord.’”
Nostra Aetate explicitly rejects such rhetoric, stating that the death of Jesus cannot be charged “against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.” It also states that “the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.”
Recent Catholic convert Candace Owens, who joined the church in April 2024, has also used her platforms which enable her to influence millions of followers to demonize the Jewish people. A study released in December showed how Owens and fellow podcaster Tucker Carlson boosted their anti-Israel content last year.
US Vice President JD Vance also converted to Catholicism in recent years, joining the church in 2019. Vance has disputed the rise of antisemitism on the political right and failed to counter antisemitic statements when confronted with them in public settings. On Friday, Axios published secret recordings of US Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) telling donors last year that “Tucker created JD. JD is Tucker’s protégé, and they are one and the same.”