(JTA) — South Florida U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz pulled on his family’s story as Jews in the Holocaust in a campaign ad targeting antisemitism, as he strives to retain his seat in the November general election.

“In every generation, they rise against us,” the Jewish incumbent says in the ad over a background of somber music and black-and-white photos from a concentration camp. “My great-grandparents were murdered in Auschwitz.”

“In our generation, right here, the Parkland shooter had swastikas carved into his gun,” he continues, standing in front of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, referring to the 2018 fatal shooting that killed 14 students and three educators.

Moskowitz, a top Democratic supporter of Israel in Congress, who fended off progressive challenger Oliver Larkin in a heated August primary, emphasizes in the ad that he has worked to fight antisemitism through bipartisan laws. Some of this legislative action has involved increasing security at synagogues and Jewish nonprofits and expanding education to reduce hate crimes.

“Never again is now,” Moskowitz concludes.

Moskowitz won the August primary with 63.5% of Democratic voter support, to Larkin’s 36.5%. But Larkin was vocal throughout the race about his opposition to arms sales to Israel, going so far as to label the country as a “religious supremacist” nation.

As Moskowitz prepares to face former Boca Raton Mayor Scott Singer, a Republican who is also Jewish, the Democrat may be facing a tight race in a region that had previously been solidly blue.

The 25th Congressional District, which includes parts of Delray Beach, Boca Raton and Miami Beach, is about 25% Jewish, according to local estimates.

Yet recent redistricting efforts have transformed the region into territory that President Donald Trump would have likely won in the 2024 elections. In fact, the Cook Political Report declared a shift from “solid D” to “toss up.”

“There’s no doubt that the race for the new 25th District will be highly competitive in a favorable environment for Democrats,” the report stated.

Moskowitz’s team emphasized the “deeply personal” nature of the congressman’s battle against antisemitism, in a statement issued alongside the ad’s release. He is confronting this challenge, his team explained, by “connecting his family’s experience during the Holocaust to the hatred that continues to threaten our communities today.”

While Moskowitz’s great-grandparents died in Auschwitz, his grandparents were able to escape Europe right before the war. His grandmother left on the Kindertransport, an organized effort that rescued Jewish children from Nazi-controlled territories beginning in 1938.

By Tuesday evening, the Google Ads Transparency Center, which includes data on YouTube ads, did not yet reflect how much money the campaign had spent on its ads there. Meta’s Ad Library also did not yet have data as to how much had been spent on the Facebook version of the ad posted there.

Stephen Sussman, a professor of public administration at Barry University, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that although “Holocaust imagery should never become routine campaign material,” he doesn’t believe that this ad has crossed a line.

“The Holocaust was, of course, a real event that continues to shape Jewish life and memory,” Sussman said, recognizing that Moskowitz’s great-grandparents were murdered at Auschwitz and that many Jews today feel threatened by antisemitism.

“He is not comparing his opponent to Hitler or using the Holocaust to make an unrelated political attack,” Sussman added.

The professor also noted the ad’s direct connections to the congressman’s record, such as his leadership in passing bipartisan legislation on antisemitism awareness and in boosting funding for synagogue security.

Sussman acknowledged that when Holocaust imagery becomes part of a campaign, there “is a legitimate concern” that other people might deploy that imagery less responsibly. But he stressed that given Moskowitz’s history and work record, as well as the current political climate, this particular ad is “powerful but defensible.”

Ken Goldstein, a politics professor at the University of San Francisco, offered a similar perspective, explaining that of the thousands of ads he has watched in his lifetime, he found this one to be powerful but not particularly controversial.

“He was certainly using pictures of the Holocaust, jarring images, but they were his family’s story,” said Goldstein, who is an expert on the impacts of political advertising.

“I don’t think he’s using it to personally attack anybody else except the Parkland shooter,” he added, noting that the ad isn’t being used to attack an opponent. “This one does not strike me as particularly harsh, unfair, or out of bounds at all.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post South Florida Democrat Moskowitz airs campaign ad targeting antisemitism with concentration camp footage appeared first on The Forward.

PITTSBURGH — Mister Rogers was from Squirrel Hill, and it was here that he built a career on a small, perhaps radical idea: that showing up for your neighbor, day after day, is its own kind of moral work.

It is a strange thing, then, that the neighborhood that made him famous — the same one that gathered in 2018 after the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history — is now consumed by a fight over what neighborliness is worth when there’s money, and a family’s retirement, on the line.

For three decades, one grocery store has anchored Squirrel Hill’s kosher life. Soon it will have new company: a rival supermarket opening just blocks away. The family that runs the original store says the new store was built in part on their own private financial records, shared in confidence during a sale that fell through. The newcomer, for its part, says it has “acted properly” throughout.

The dispute is now headed to a rabbinical tribunal, where both sides will make their case.

This is a very Squirrel Hill kind of story, intimate enough that it’s hard to separate the business from the relationships underneath it. It’s also part of something bigger: the fight reflects a broader shift already underway in kosher retail, where small, single-location grocers are increasingly competing not just with each other but with regional chains and delivery networks that didn’t used to reach a market this size.

‘Cheek by jowl’

By midafternoon on a recent Thursday, Murray Avenue Kosher is deep into its weekly pre-Shabbat rush — cashiers ringing up customers as fast as they can, stockers racing to keep pace with what’s flying off the shelves. Behind the deli counter, a line of people wait while workers slice cold cuts and pack containers of whitefish and kugel.

On the front door hangs a sign reading “Israel — We Stand With You,” put up after the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023. A few feet away, on a window, is a Steelers poster — a small reminder that this is a Jewish community that is also, unmistakably, a Pittsburgh one.

For Ellie Feibus, 39, who lives within walking distance, the store is less an occasional stop than a daily habit: coffee some mornings on her way to work at a synagogue preschool, lunch, dinner in the evening, a Thursday wine tasting. She often has her dog, Anschel — a blind, toothless, 12-year-old pug — with her. She greets people by name, wishing “Good Shabbos” to those she passes and “Hi, honey” to several others.

When Feibus got COVID during the pandemic, she called Aryeh Markovic, who runs the store with his parents, Saul and Beth. He personally delivered groceries to her doorstep. Without being asked, he added a container of chicken soup.

It’s that kind of care, she said, that would be hardest to replicate in a new store: “the part that’s going to be missing.”

Step outside and you’re in the heart of Squirrel Hill, home to a large swath of Pittsburgh’s roughly 50,000 Jews, three day schools and about a dozen synagogues across the denominational spectrum — a community that has been here, largely intact, for generations.

“In Squirrel Hill, everybody lives cheek by jowl,” said Mark Oppenheimer, who wrote a book chronicling how the neighborhood held together after the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting. “Even the more liberal and Reform Jews will power-walk with the Orthodox on their lunch hour. In a lot of cities there’d be real distance between those worlds. Here, there isn’t.”

The neighborhood’s epicenter is the corner of Murray and Forbes avenues, adjacent to the Jewish Community Center, and the same intersection where the community gathered for a vigil the Saturday night after the shooting.

That corner was, until recently, home to a Rite Aid. But after the financially strapped drugstore chain declared bankruptcy in 2025, the building became available to lease.

Deal or no deal

Yitzchok Glassner, a transplant to Pittsburgh, wanted to get into the kosher supermarket business. The timing seemed fortuitous. Saul and Beth Markovic bought Murray Avenue Kosher in 1996; their son Aryeh joined as a partner in 2021. By last year, Saul and Beth were ready to retire — just as Glassner came looking for a store to buy.

In June 2025, Glassner expressed interest in Murray Avenue Kosher, and the two sides signed a non-disclosure agreement. Over the course of several weeks, the Markovic family handed over the store’s tax returns and profit-and-loss statements.

Glassner wanted to put his supermarket — with the name Murray’s Market — in the former Rite Aid building. Doing so meant winning approval from a bankruptcy judge working with Rite Aid, who needed proof the new venture could pay the rent. The Markovics allege that without their permission or knowledge, Glassner submitted their financial records along with a declaration stating that Murray’s Market was, in Glassner’s words, “acquiring Murray Avenue Kosher.” No such acquisition existed.

The Markovics say that they had yet to reach a deal with Glassner when he told the court he was acquiring Murray Avenue Kosher. They also claim that Glassner broke the non-disclosure agreement by sharing their private financial information, which is now in the public record as part of a filing in the Rite Aid bankruptcy case.

“Nobody is going to buy the business now if there’s a competing store opening 200 feet down the block,” said Shaya Markovic, Aryeh’s brother. “Had we known he intended to use the documents to open a competing store, my parents would never have given them.”

Talks between the Markovics and Glassner broke down.

Brandywine Communities, the owner and landlord of the former Rite Aid building, announced in August that Murray’s Market was granted the lease. Renovations are expected to begin in the coming months with a planned opening in 2027.

Whether it gets there without further complications is an open question. The underlying fight — over whether Glassner owes the Markovics anything and what should be done if he does — is now headed to the Beth Din of America, a rabbinical high court.

A different kind of court

Few outside the Orthodox Jewish world have ever heard of the Beth Din of America, let alone know that a fight like this one could end up decided there, by a panel of rabbis rather than a judge or jury.

Murray Avenue Kosher’s Markovic said what he wants is straightforward: financial compensation from Glassner for damages he believes were caused to his business.

Glassner struck a different note: “In the interest of peace, we attempted to reach an understanding with another establishment, but sadly, those efforts were unsuccessful,” read a statement he sent to the Forward. “Nevertheless, throughout the process, we have acted properly, and we remain confident that all matters will be settled amicably.”

The Beth Din of America functions much like private arbitration in the secular world. Both sides have to agree to bring a dispute there, and once they do, the ruling is binding. A losing party can’t simply refile the same case in civil court and abide by that ruling instead.

Cases like this one are typically decided by a panel of three rabbinic judges. The Beth Din of America, modeled after the rabbinical courts in ancient times, maintains a roster of rabbis it works with, each with different specialties — one might have more experience with family law, another with contracts and business disputes. Some of the rabbis are lawyers themselves.

The arbitration can take place at the Beth Din of America’s Manhattan offices, or any other location that the parties and the Beth Din agree to, with follow-up sessions sometimes held over Zoom.

Sources who have previously worked with the Beth Din of America expect a case like this to be litigated in the coming weeks — with perhaps a slight delay due to Yom Kippur and Sukkot. A written ruling can take additional weeks to finalize.

Rabbi Yitzi Genack of the Vaad Harabonim of Pittsburgh, which certifies kosher establishments in the city, did not respond to multiple requests for an interview. A spokesperson for Brandywine Communities, the landlord and owner of the former Rite Aid building, declined a request for an interview.

A street with history

The new Murray’s Market is not facing off only against one other kosher option.

Directly across the street from Murray Avenue Kosher, the local Giant Eagle — a large regional supermarket chain — runs its own in-house kosher bakery and stocks a decent selection of kosher meat: cold cuts, chicken, beef, steak and brisket. There was already competition, in other words, long before Glassner decided to open a new store.

“For over a century, many important kosher establishments have served Pittsburgh’s diverse Jewish community, including Adler’s Delicatessen and Grocery, Kosher Mart, Murray Avenue Kosher, and Prime Kosher,” read a statement from Glassner. “For many years, these establishments — often operating side by side — contributed greatly to the Jewish community.”

In the 1940s, Murray Avenue supported at least 10 kosher butchers, a handful of kosher poultry stores, two fish stores, six bakeries and 14 grocery stores, according to Eric Lidji, director of the Rauh Jewish History Program & Archives at the Heinz History Center. Rabbi Bernard Poupko, who led Congregation Shaare Torah in Squirrel Hill from 1942 to 1996, once called the street the yidisher gas, the Jewish street, even as the businesses lining it kept changing hands.

Adler’s Delicatessen is a case study in how the markets have changed. Founded in the late 1910s, it became a Murray Avenue fixture — until the Adler family sold it, in 1974, to U-Se Chu, a Korean immigrant. Under Chu’s ownership, the deli kept its kosher-style menu and its Jewish character for decades, before the family retired and sold it in 1997.

On Murray Avenue, in other words, a kosher institution outliving — or even changing hands entirely from — its founding family is not a new story.

A larger trend

Kosher shopping in Squirrel Hill does not even require a storefront anymore. Evergreen, a kosher supermarket chain with locations in New York and New Jersey, makes bulk kosher deliveries to eight cities across the Midwest as well as to Pittsburgh — part of a broader pattern of national and regional players reaching smaller Jewish communities that, until recently, only had access to whatever their local grocer carried.

Customers have noticed. Feibus, a devoted Murray Avenue Kosher shopper, said some of Pittsburgh’s newer transplants from the northeast have grown used to bigger, more polished kosher chains like Seasons and want the same thing locally. The Grove, a South Florida-based kosher supermarket chain, has added locations in Ohio and Michigan in recent years. Many Costco and Trader Joe’s locations across the country stock kosher chicken and other products for Jewish customers.

This fight is bigger than one grocer and one new competitor. Mom-and-pop kosher stores no longer have these smaller Jewish communities to themselves.

Not everyone in the neighborhood sees a second kosher store as a threat. Ronna Harris Askin, 78, a longtime Squirrel Hill resident, said she plans to shop at both.

“Competition is always good,” she said. She’s fond of Murray Avenue Kosher — it “mostly meets my needs,” she said — but doesn’t think one store should have to carry the whole neighborhood. “It’s good for the economy to have two places. It makes everybody be on their toes to do a good job.”

Harris Askin has seen the alternative firsthand. Her daughter and son-in-law live in Toco Hills, a heavily Jewish Atlanta neighborhood, where both Kroger and Publix stock kosher meat and other products alongside two dedicated kosher markets — evidence, to her, that a bigger Jewish community can support more kosher retail without strain.

What comes next

Markovic isn’t waiting around to find out what the Beth Din of America decides.

He’s already working on what comes next at Murray Avenue Kosher. In the coming months, he plans to move the deli counter to a new space in the store and expand its offerings to include restaurant menu items like chicken sandwiches and hamburgers. He’ll be adding tables for seating. He has also hired a chef to make fresh sushi daily.

A year ago, Markovic was contemplating getting out of the business. Now he is doing the opposite: pouring money into the same store he nearly sold, betting that the surest answer to a rival two blocks away isn’t a rabbinical court, but a better rotisserie chicken.

“It’s imperative to get it done quickly,” Markovic said. One of his brothers is flying in to help him push through the vendor calls and the small decisions that used to take him weeks to get to. “I have ninety-seven phone calls in between everything I want to do,” he said, and laughed, a little wearily, before picking up to answer another one.

The post A new grocer is moving into Squirrel Hill. Its rival says the deal isn’t kosher. appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — The Israeli army chief of staff on Monday ordered the military to examine possible legal action over “NAZA,” a documentary alleging that Israeli forces knowingly killed large numbers of civilians in Gaza.

The 80-minute documentary by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday, two days after its premiere there drew a 25-minute standing ovation. In Israel, it drew widespread condemnation from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, senior military officials, former hostages and other public figures.

Eyal Zamir requested that Military Advocate General Maj. Gen. Itai Ofir “examine security aspects and possible involvement in relation to the leak of classified materials used in the production of the film” as well as advance “possible legal actions regarding the film and those involved in it.”

Zamir also convened senior IDF officials, including the deputy chief of staff, the military advocate general, the air force commander and the commander of the elite 8200 military intelligence unit to address what the army says are the film’s distortions.

In a statement announcing the meeting, Zamir denounced the film’s allegations as “blood libels,” a “deliberate distortion of reality” and “false and grave accusations” against Israeli soldiers and commanders.

The film “adopts narratives of Israel-haters, defames our soldiers and commanders, and seeks to present the IDF as deliberately acting unlawfully,” he said.

“This is a dangerous attempt to deprive us of the legitimacy to defend ourselves against the worst of our enemies, and in the process, to put IDF soldiers and commanders in real danger,” Zamir added.

The IDF said in a separate statement that it “categorically rejects” the film’s allegations and questioned the credibility of its anonymous sources. It said some claims about national and military strategy were “clearly beyond the knowledge of junior-level soldiers” and that intelligence personnel cited in the film “by definition would not have been involved” in some of the situations described. It also rejected what it called the film’s portrayal of unintended civilian deaths from lawful strikes as deliberate killing or part of a “genocide.”

The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says that over 70,000 people have been killed in the war launched by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, with deadly raids inside Israel. The army does not dispute the number, but says that a substantial portion of the dead are fighters. Gaza’s health ministry does not distinguish between fighters and civilians.

The military also disputed NAZA’s depiction of artificial intelligence in targeting, saying such decisions are made “by human personnel only.” It said anticipated civilian harm is weighed against the expected military advantage before a strike is approved and that attacks are not carried out when that harm would be disproportionate.

The IDF added that it had only seen excerpts and a trailer, and asked the filmmakers for a full screening before responding comprehensively.

Israeli government agencies, including the Foreign Ministry, also met Monday to coordinate a response to the film and sent Israeli diplomats abroad talking points rebutting its allegations. The talking points accused NAZA of turning “the truth on its head” and serving as a “disguise for Hamas propaganda,” according to a foreign ministry document cited by Ynet.

Netanyahu also condemned the film on Monday, calling it “shocking” in a video posted to X.

“We’re fighting worldwide antisemitic incitement, but when it comes from within us, it’s intolerable,” he said.

Culture Minister Miki Zohar went further, asking the Interior Ministry and Population and Immigration Authority to examine whether Abraham and Szor’s conduct could justify revoking their Israeli citizenship. Zohar accused the filmmakers of harming Israel abroad and said officials should examine whether the way material for the film was obtained or published could amount to treason or assisting the enemy during wartime.

Released hostage Eliya Cohen, who was held in Gaza for 505 days, also attacked the filmmakers, accusing them of spreading lies about soldiers who fought to bring him home and of endangering Israelis and Jews abroad. Cohen urged the public to hang posters with photos of the filmmakers so that “when they walk down the street they will feel ashamed.”

“People should spit on them,” he said. “The blood of our friends, the blood of Diaspora Jews, is on their hands.”

Abraham defended the film in a tense interview Monday with veteran Channel 13 journalist Raviv Drucker, who pressed him on how the filmmakers verified the accounts of the 24 anonymous soldiers.

“I have to tell you that as a journalist, I don’t think I would have aired this,” Drucker told Abraham, arguing there was “no supporting evidence” publicly available to independently confirm the claims.

“We don’t have their names, we don’t have their units,” Drucker said. “We don’t have the dates of the events, places, or who was hit. We basically have nothing to hold on to, to refute or confirm these very serious testimonies.”

Abraham said editors at The Guardian, which produced the film, had access to the underlying material. “The identities of the people were verified, the cases they discussed were verified,” he said.

He also accused Israeli television of failing to seriously investigate civilian casualties and rules of engagement in Gaza during the war. “NAZA” is the Hebrew acronym for “collateral damage.”

More than 700 Israeli film professionals signed a petition backing Abraham and Szor, accusing officials of waging an “unprecedented campaign of incitement and vitriol” against the filmmakers that they said came close  to legitimizing of violence. Signatories included Ari Folman, Hagai Levi, Shlomi Elkabetz, Shira Geffen and Nir Bergman.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Israeli army weighs legal action against NAZA film makers amid calls to revoke their citizenship appeared first on The Forward.