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NYC public schools don’t have the final two days of Passover off next year. A petition is trying to change that.
(New York Jewish Week) – New York City educators and parents are protesting after the city announced that public schools would be open for part of Passover next year, breaking from a longstanding tradition.
The eight-day holiday has overlapped virtually every year with the city’s spring break since 1973, when Jewish teachers successfully lobbied to guarantee the alignment.
But next year, Easter and Passover are separated by three weeks, making it impossible for the city’s weeklong school recess to overlap with both of them. The school-year calendar released last Friday revealed that the NYC Department of Education had scheduled the final two days of the holiday, April 29 and 30, as school days.
Because those days are Jewish holidays, when certain activities are prohibited according to Jewish law, observant educators and students would not be able to attend. The departure from tradition has put those people in a difficult situation, in part because educators have limited flexibility to take days off under their union contract.
“I’m religious and I am required by my religion to take those days off, regardless of whether we have school or not,” Yocheved Diskind, an occupational therapist at a public school in West Harlem, told the New York Jewish Week. “So now I have to take two extra days off and I don’t get paid at all for them.”
Diskind is one of around 1,500 people to have signed a petition calling on the city to extend the spring recess to include the Passover holidays.
“At a time when the values of inclusion are under attack, respecting the full observance of the Passover holiday should not be dependent on its proximity to Easter on the calendar,” says the petition, whose first signatories are from the occupational and physical therapists’ chapter of the United Federation of Teachers.
The pushback comes at a moment when the structure of the school year is being contested on several fronts. In a bid for inclusion, the education department has recently added holidays from multiple traditions to the school calendar — including the Muslim holidays of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha; the Chinese Lunar New Year; Juneteenth and, potentially in the future, the Hindu festival of Diwali. Depending on how each holiday falls, the new days off can put pressure on the city to meet a 180-day minimum set by state law.
At the same time, the city education department and its teachers union negotiate annually over when teachers must work, and the city’s goal is to maximize the time that teachers are required to be in the classroom. Next year’s school calendar includes 185 required workdays for educators, including 182 instructional days, leaving some in the union concerned that members are being exploited.
“They used to build in an extra two or three days: In case they had to cancel for snow days, they would still reach 180 days. But since the pandemic, snow days are all remote days,” Diskind said. “So there’s no reason to build in even an extra two days into the calendar without extra compensation.”
The city, meanwhile, says it negotiated the new calendar with the union and that the holidays that are required contractually to be days off are. About the end of Passover, Nathaniel Steyer, the DOE press secretary, told the New York Jewish Week that the union “never ever brought this up” in negotiations about the calendar.
The UFT did not respond to repeated requests for comment by press time.
“There is no precedent for giving all days of Passover with a split,” Styer said in a statement. “There has been a split three times in recent memory — with the last night falling on the weekend. It is in our labor agreements that only the first two days of Passover and Good Friday are covered. Spring Recess is not in our labor contracts, but we generally attempt to cover most of Passover & Easter, when they are aligned on the calendar.”
New York City is among the rare school districts where Jewish holidays have been baked into the school-year calendar. For decades, the city had so many Jewish teachers and students that having classes on major Jewish holidays was a fool’s errand. The 1973 agreement around Passover came as the number of Jewish students and teachers was dwindling.
Now, the district has relatively few observant Jewish students; Orthodox schoolchildren in the city almost all attend private schools. But there are significant numbers of Orthodox education department employees, including in support services such as speech and occupational therapy. (The petition notes that students who attend school on Passover might have to do so without the support of these providers.) And the expectation not to have school on major Jewish holidays has largely survived, at times resulting in quirky calendars, such as a five-day gap between the first and second days of school in 2010.
The school calendar departed from the 1973 Passover agreement only once, in 1986, according to the petition. That year, Passover and Easter were not close in time, and adding two additional days off would have taken the district below the state requirement. Teachers then were given blanket approval to take the days as personal days, the petition says.
Diskind, the occupational therapist in West Harlem, explained that teachers could take the two days of Passover as personal days next year but would be left with only one discretionary day for the rest of the school year. They could also take time off without pay, an option that some Jewish educators exercise when other Jewish holidays fall on school days, but doing so has financial repercussions. (During the next school year, the fall Jewish holidays all land on weekends except for Yom Kippur, when schools are closed. Shavuot, the two-day spring festival, falls midweek in June.)
“Most people choose to take an unpaid day off because you generally need to use personal days for other reasons that would not be excused throughout the year,” Diskind said. “In the long term, unpaid days also require you to stay longer in order to reach your pension.”
Districts around the country have contended with how to accommodate religious observances — and not everyone believes the solution is ever to close schools at all.
David Bloomfield, an education professor who was a parent leader in New York City when his own children attended its public schools, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2020 that he thought districts should ramp up their protections for students and teachers who miss school for religious reasons instead of trying to adjust the calendar to please everyone.
“With the growth and sensitivity toward diversity, it’s one thing for a hermetic community to observe its traditions,” Bloomfield said. “But as we become more diverse, we have a harder time accommodating all of those important ceremonial obligations.”
“New York City is home to a diverse population, including 1.6 million Jews. People who celebrate Passover are a part of the rich fabric of our city,” says the petition. “The Passover holiday should not be an arena for givebacks and increased instructional days without compensation.”
“The proposed DOE calendar is especially disturbing in light of the increase in anti-Semitic rhetoric and attacks in recent years, particularly in New York City,” it also noted.
The number of anti-Jewish hate crimes in the first five months of the year was 100, according to data released this week by the New York Police Department, showing a 25% decline from 135 during the same period last year. Jews accounted for the victims of half of all hate crimes in the city last year and remain the most-targeted group, according to the police data; two men recently pleaded guilty to hate crimes related to a high-profile 2021 attack on a Jewish man who was beaten while walking to a pro-Israel rally.
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Jewish groups defend European media monitors banned for what State Dept. calls ‘censorship’
Two major Jewish groups defended a digital hate-speech researcher who has been barred by President Donald Trump’s administration from entering the country.
Representatives for Jewish Federations of North America and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs responded after the U.S. State Department restricted the visas of five European digital speech activists. The banned activists include two who helped Jewish college students sue the social network X over the proliferation of antisemitic content on the platform, and another who has advised Jewish federations on social media hygiene. The government made the announcement late Tuesday.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was taking these steps in order to combat “censorship.”
“For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose,” Rubio wrote on X. “The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.”
But representatives for JFNA and the JCPA, two groups that have worked extensively with the British digital researcher Imran Ahmed, stood up for him in interviews with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Ahmed, the group leaders said, is an important ally in the fight against antisemitism.
“He is a valuable partner in providing accurate and detailed information on how the social media algorithms have created a bent toward antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and he will remain a valuable partner,” Dennis Bernard, head of government relations for JFNA, told JTA about Ahmed.
Ahmed’s research has helped inform the federation movement’s larger strategy to counter antisemitism on social media. Last month JFNA and Ahmed’s group, the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, jointly released a report detailing how Instagram’s algorithm promotes antisemitism.
Ahmed also presented his findings at JFNA’s recent General Assembly in Washington, as well as at a Jewish Funders Network convening, and has spoken at the Eradicate Hate Global Summit in Pittsburgh — which was founded in the aftermath of the 2018 Tree of Life shootings. Separately, he has researched the proliferation of antisemitic content across various social networks following the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks.
Bernard declined to comment on Rubio’s move to restrict Ahmed’s visa, but noted, “We will look into this.” Regarding Ahmed, Bernard said, “If there’s something there we don’t know about, of course we will terminate our relationship with him.”
JCPA CEO Amy Spitalnick also praised Ahmed’s work fighting antisemitism. She harshly criticized the State Department’s targeting of him.
“He’s dedicated his career to fighting online hate and extremism,” Spitalnick told JTA about Ahmed. She denounced his targeting as “all part of the broader weaponization of the federal government to go after perceived political enemies and advance an extremist agenda, which in this case is to push back against any regulation of tech.”
Ahmed and Spitalnick began working together in the aftermath of Spitalnick’s successful effort to prosecute the organizers of the “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, Virginia. They bonded over a shared interest in how online spaces were giving rise to hate activities like the rally. They have since partnered on a report about antisemitism on X. Shortly after Oct. 7, Ahmed appeared in a webinar with Spitalnick discussing how extremist groups were seizing on the attacks to spread antisemitism and anti-Muslim sentiments.
Ahmed wasn’t the only target on the State Department’s list with connections to Jewish groups.
In 2023 the European Union of Jewish Students, a group representing pro-Israel Jewish university students throughout Europe, sued X, then called Twitter, in German court over the proliferation of antisemitic content, including Holocaust denial, on the social network. Filing alongside them was HateAid, a German legal group that says it “advocates for human rights in the digital space.”
HateAid’s leaders, Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg, were also named on the State Department’s list of visa restrictions this week.
“Twitter has betrayed our trust. By allowing hateful content to spread, the company fails to protect users, and Jews in particular,” Avital Grinberg, then the head of the European Union of Jewish Students, said about her lawsuit at the time. “If Jews are forced out of the virtual space due to antisemitism and digital violence, Jewish life will become invisible in a place that is relevant to society.”
“Twitter owes us a communication platform where we can move freely and without fear of hatred and agitation,” Ballon, the head of HateAid’s legal team, said then.
Anna-Lena von Hodenberg, founder of HateAid, attends the ceremony for the presentation of the 2021 ifa Award for the Dialogue of Cultures, at Allianz Forum in Berlin, Sept, 14, 2021. (Adam Berry/Getty Images)
Reached for comment Wednesday, Grinberg said the Trump administration’s move against HateAid’s leaders was “dangerous for people like us.”
“For me personally, and I think for many young Jews who are exposed to antisemitism online, these organizations are crucial,” she said. “These are people who give us tools to respond to the hatred we experience online every day, across all the platforms.”
Today Grinberg is general manager of EU Watch, a watchdog group that critiques the European Union from a pro-Israel perspective.
The individuals were targeted as part of a larger battle on the right to fight what conservatives see as an effort by tech activists to silence conservative voices — an effort that is clashing with institutional Jewish groups’ longstanding push for tougher restrictions on tech platforms to limit the spread of antisemitism and Holocaust denial.
In a statement explaining the restrictions, the State Department said the five activists had run afoul of a visa law passed earlier this year aimed at “foreign nationals who censor Americans.”
On X, Rubio said the administration “will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.”
The U.S. crackdown on tech activists comes as antisemitism and other kinds of hate content have proliferated on American tech platforms, whose leaders — including some Jews like Instagram and Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg — have largely cultivated warm relationships with President Trump since he reassumed power.
Regulators in Europe, where laws around Holocaust denial and other forms of hate speech are stricter than in the U.S., have sought to impose a stronger hand on tech platforms that operate on the continent. European regulators have particularly expressed concern about X, where antisemitism and Holocaust denial have become a particularly acute problem.
X is run by billionaire Elon Musk, who is both the world’s richest man and a onetime key Trump ally who played a prominent role in the early months of his administration. Though Musk and Trump have since appeared to have a falling-out, Musk has continued to promote right-wing ideas and Republican causes on X, and has also endorsed European far-right parties. He has long flirted with antisemitic ideas on the platform himself, and has regularly feuded with the Anti-Defamation League.
Sarah Rogers, U.S. undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, gave a more extensive rundown of the reasons behind each visa restriction on X (itself reposted by Musk).
HateAid, Rogers claimed, “routinely demands access to propriety [sic] social media platform data to help it censor more.” Rogers also singled out a remark Ballon had given on a 60 Minutes episode that she said the government found objectionable: “Free speech needs boundaries.”
Ahmed, according to Rogers, was a “key collaborator with the Biden Administration’s effort to weaponize the government against U.S. citizens.” She particularly took offense with the Centre for Countering Digital Hate’s focus on anti-vaccine rhetoric, which had included calls to deplatform Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who, among other things, has spread conspiracy theories linking Jews to COVID-19.
Today Kennedy is Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. He praised the news of the visa restrictions on X, writing, “Once again, the United States is the mecca for freedom of speech!”
Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, speaks at the Eradicate Hate summit in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Oct. 5, 2023. On Dec. 23, 2025, the US State Department barred Ahmed and four other European digital anti-hate advocates from entering the country. (Screenshot via YouTube)
Rogers, the State Department undersecretary, also invoked a term closely associated with antisemitism — the blood libel — in her justification for why another European figure, Clare Melford, also fell under the new visa restrictions.
Melford runs the Global Disinformation Index, a British nonprofit that says it seeks to counter online disinformation but has been accused by conservative groups of bias. The group has in the past spoken out about misinformation “linking Jews to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
“If you question Canadian blood libels about residential schools, you’re engaging in ‘hate speech’ according to Melford and GDI,” Rogers wrote on X. She highlighted a description, purportedly from the group, referring to “digital denialism around residential schools.”
The passage highlighted by Rogers references Canada’s infamous residential school system, an effort to force cultural assimilation on the country’s Indigenous populations that resulted in the deaths of thousands of children and persisted for generations. Canada has issued formal apologies for residential schools, with a truth-and-reconciliation commission report concluding that they amounted to cultural genocide.
Conservative parties in Canada have questioned, downplayed or rejected accepted historical accounts of abuses under Canada’s residential school system.
The other European activist barred from the U.S. on Wednesday is Thierry Breton, a former European Union commissioner.
In a statement to JTA, HateAid blasted the decision to bar its leaders from the US as “an act of repression by a government that is increasingly disregarding the rule of law and trying to silence its critics by any means necessary.”
The group added, “We will not be intimidated by a government that uses accusations of censorship to silence those who stand up for human rights and freedom of expression. Despite the significant strain and restrictions placed on us and our families by US government measures, we will continue our work with all our strength — now more than ever.”
Grinberg, the Jewish former student who had sued X along with HateAid, wound up losing her case in German court. But the State Department’s latest moves against her allies, she said, may not amount to much in the end.
“It’s just a statement. Like, OK, two people cannot enter the US. It sucks for them. It sucks for democratic values and for the debating culture. But ultimately, I don’t see how Musk is particularly benefitting from that,” she said. “For me, it’s more a performative act.”
In early 2023, when they first sued Musk’s platform, “we thought antisemitism had never been as bad as it is now,” she said. “Now we see that it is even worse. But that’s why you need counterforces. You need people like them.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Jewish groups defend European media monitors banned for what State Dept. calls ‘censorship’ appeared first on The Forward.
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British police drop case against Bob Vylan for ‘Death to the IDF’ chant, sparking outrage from Jewish groups
British police ended an investigation into the British punk band Bob Vylan, months after the rap duo led thousands of Glastonbury music festival attendees in chants of “Death, death to the IDF.”
“We have concluded, after reviewing all the evidence, that it does not meet the criminal threshold outlined by the CPS for any person to be prosecuted,” wrote Avon and Somerset Police in a statement Tuesday. “No further action will be taken on the basis there is insufficient evidence for there to be a realistic prospect of conviction.”
Following the rap duo’s incendiary chant at Glastonbury, the pair were condemned Jewish leaders in the United Kingdom, and had their U.S. visas revoked by the State Department. In October, one of the band’s members, Bobby Vylan, doubled down on the anti-Israel chant in an interview with documentarian Louis Theroux.
“Simply because there is a high threshold for criminal conviction should in no way minimise the concerns raised by many sectors of society around the nature of the comments made,” the police statement continued.
In a post on X following the ruling, Bob Vylan argued that the criminal investigation into the chant “was never warranted in the first place.”
“We hope this news inspires others in the UK and around the world to speak up, in support of the Palestinian people, without fear,” the band wrote. “We have had our shows cancelled, visas revoked, our names tarnished and our lives upended, but what we have lost in peace and security we have gained tenfold in spirit and camaraderie.”
Bob Vylan’s chant at Glastonbury in June came months after the Irish rap group Kneecap kicked off a string of anti-Israel stunts by British musicians at the Coachella music festival in April. In September, terrorism charges against one of the band members, Liam O’Hanna, were also dropped.
The decision to drop the investigation into Bob Vylan was lambasted by Jewish groups in the United Kingdom, including the Community Security Trust, which cited the recent antisemitic terror attacks in Manchester, England and Sydney, Australia.
“It is deeply disappointing that vile calls for violence, repeated openly and without remorse, continue to fall on deaf ears,” the Community Security Trust told The Guardian. “Especially in the wake of the terror attacks in Manchester and Bondi, when will such calls finally be recognised for what they are: a real and dangerous instigator of bloodshed?”
Last week, police in London and Manchester announced that they would begin to arrest pro-Palestinian protesters who chant the slogan “globalize the intifada,” citing the Sydney attack on a Hanukkah event that killed 15.
“It is incredibly disappointing that the police and CPS have decided not to charge in this case, particularly when police forces in London and Manchester are adopting a stronger approach to tackling hateful rhetoric,” wrote the Embassy of Israel in London in a post on X. “It sends completely the wrong message at the worst possible time.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post British police drop case against Bob Vylan for ‘Death to the IDF’ chant, sparking outrage from Jewish groups appeared first on The Forward.
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A French Court Acquitted a Nanny Who Poisoned a Jewish Family of Antisemitism. Now Prosecutors Are Appealing.
Procession arrives at Place des Terreaux with a banner reading, “Against Antisemitism, for the Republic,” during the march against antisemitism, in Lyon, France, June 25, 2024. Photo: Romain Costaseca / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect
Prosecutors in France have appealed a court ruling that convicted a nanny of poisoning the food of the Jewish family for whom she worked but cleared her of antisemitism charges, in the latest flashpoint as French authorities grapple with an ongoing nationwide surge in antisemitism.
On Tuesday, the public prosecutor’s office in Nanterre, just west of Paris, announced it had appealed a criminal court ruling that acquitted the family’s nanny of antisemitism-aggravated charges after she poisoned their food and drinks.
Last week, the 42-year-old Algerian woman was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for “administering a harmful substance that caused incapacitation for more than eight days.”
Residing illegally in France, the nanny had worked as a live-in caregiver for the family and their three children — aged two, five, and seven — since November 2023.
The French court declined to uphold any antisemitism charges against the defendant, noting that her incriminating statements were made several weeks after the incident and recorded by a police officer without a lawyer present
The family’s lawyers described the ruling as “incomprehensible,” insisting that “justice has not been served.”
The nanny, who has been living in France in violation of a deportation order issued in February 2024, was also convicted of using a forged document — a Belgian national identity card — and barred from entering France for five years.
First reported by Le Parisien, the shocking incident occurred in January last year, just two months after the caregiver was hired, when the mother discovered cleaning products in the wine she drank and suffered severe eye pain from using makeup remover contaminated with a toxic substance, prompting her to call the police.
After a series of forensic tests, investigators detected polyethylene glycol — a chemical commonly used in industrial and pharmaceutical products — along with other toxic substances in the food consumed by the family and their three children.
According to court documents, these chemicals were described as “harmful, even corrosive, and capable of causing serious injuries to the digestive tract.”
Even though the nanny initially denied the charges against her, she later confessed to police that she had poured a soapy lotion into the family’s food as a warning because “they were disrespecting her.”
“They have money and power, so I should never have worked for a Jewish woman — it only brought me trouble,” the nanny told the police. “I knew I could hurt them, but not enough to kill them.”
According to her lawyer, the nanny later withdrew her confession, arguing that jealousy and a perceived financial grievance were the main factors behind the attack.
At trial, the defendant described her statements as “hateful” but denied that her actions were driven by racism or antisemitism.
The appeal comes as France continues to face a steep rise in antisemitic incidents in the wake of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.
In a disturbing new case, French authorities have also opened an investigation after a social media video went viral showing a man harassing a young Jewish child at a Paris airport, shouting “free Palestine” and calling him a “pig.”
Widely circulated online, the video shows a young boy playing a video game at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport when a man approaches, grabs his toy, and begins verbally assaulting him.
“Are you gonna free Palestine, bro?” the man, who remains off-camera, yells at the boy.
“If you don’t free them, I’ll snatch your hat off, bro,” the assailant continues, referring to the child’s kippah.
ANTISEMITIC INCIDENT AT PARIS–CDG AIRPORT :
Wednesday, June 25, 2025, at around 7:00 a.m, in the PlayStation Zone
of Terminal 2B at Paris–Charles de Gaulle Airport, a man in his early 30s, speaking with a British accent
, verbally and physically targeted two… pic.twitter.com/8XY3ze0EYb
— SwordOfSalomon (@SwordOfSalomon) December 21, 2025
The man is also heard repeatedly telling the child, “Dance, pig,” while the confused and frightened boy is seen trying to comply
Local police confirmed that an investigation has been launched into the incident, classified as violence based on race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion, as authorities work to identify the individual and bring him to justice.
Paris police chief Patrice Faure expressed his “outrage at these unacceptable and intolerable remarks,” promising that the incident “will not go unpunished.”
Yonathan Arfi, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) — the main representative body of French Jews — condemned the incident, calling it “yet another illustration of the climate of antisemitism that has prevailed in Europe” since the Hamas-led atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023.