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Orthodox pilgrimage to the grave of Kabbalah rabbi buried in Istanbul picks up after COVID slump
ISTANBUL (JTA) — Dozens of Orthodox Jews gathered on a hill overlooking the Bosphorus Strait.
Above them, guarding the hilltop, stood a Turkish military base, and below sat the swanky Istanbul neighborhood of Ortaköy. Dominating the view was the 15th of July Martyrs Bridge, which connects Europe and Asia. On the Asian side of the Strait loomed the massive Çamlica Mosque.
None of those sites were of interest to the crowd, however. The hill also contains one of Istanbul’s main Jewish cemeteries, and those gathered — who came from Turkey, the United States and Israel — were there to pay their respects on the yahrzeit, or death anniversary, of Rabbi Naphtali HaKohen Katz, an influential and prolific 17th-century rabbi who was devoted to Jewish mysticism.
Pilgrimages like this one, made by Orthodox groups of varying sizes to the grave sites of similarly revered Jewish figures across Europe, are far from uncommon and have spawned a cottage travel industry. Among the largest and most publicized is the annual pilgrimage to Uman, Ukraine, which brings tens of thousands to the grave of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov each Rosh Hashanah (not on the anniversary of his death). Another involves the grave of Rabbi Elimelech Weisbaum, an early Hasidic leader, in Lizhensk, Poland, in the early spring.
(David I. Klein)
Yitzhak Friedman, a Hasidic Jew from Lakewood, New Jersey, who is currently studying in Israel, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he and a few friends used the opportunity of Katz’s yahrzeit to rationalize a short trip to Istanbul.
“It was cheap tickets, we heard a lot of great things, so I had a nice jump over for two days,” he said.
Another group of Orthodox women from Israel said they had planned their trip similarly to coincide with the “hilulah” — using the Hebrew word for such a pilgrimage.
Though the pilgrimage to Uman has become a rowdy days-long affair, during which the influx of Orthodox Jews rent out most of the small city’s available apartments and hotel rooms, other pilgrimages, such as the one to Katz’s grave, have a more quiet and introspective atmosphere. The crowd on Tuesday took breaks from praying to eat at the cemetery’s synagogue, passing around whiskey and snacks.
Friedman said that he has made several similar journeys in the past year alone, including to Dynow, Poland, to the grave of Reb Tzvi Elimelech, another early Hasidic leader. He also spent more than 30 hours traveling to war-torn Ukraine to spend Rosh Hashanah in Uman, a practice that was strongly discouraged by both Israeli and Ukrainian rabbinic leaders this year.
The Jewish cemetery where Katz is buried offers a hilltop view of the city. (David I. Klein)
Friedman said he had heard that a visit to Katz’s grave had helped people with various things, from finding “the right match” to having kids have kids to being cured from a sickness. He asked simply for “happiness” in his prayers.
He also attributed some of the effects of the grave to the fact that it is visited less than the one in Uman.
“It’s known that a tzaddik that very few people come to, his powers are much bigger,” Friedman said.
Another of the pilgrims, a Hasidic man from the Doroger sect in Bnei Brak, Israel, explained that he was a distant descendent of Katz, and that, though he was coming for the first time, he came to accompany his father who had been making the trip for 50 years.
Katz was born in 1649, in what is today Ostrovo, Ukraine, and at the age of 14 he was captured and sold into slavery by Tatars, a Turkic muslim group in Crimea and other parts of Southern Ukraine. But he escaped years later and returned to Ostrovo to become the community’s rabbi, later transferring to Posen in modern-day Poland, where he became a scholar of Kabbalistic literature.
But his struggles would not end with the Tatars. Later in life, Katz was called to Frankfurt, in today’s Germany, to serve the community there. When a fire broke out in the city in 1711, he was accused of using kabbalistic charms to stop it from being extinguished by natural means and imprisoned by the local leadership.
Upon his release, he fled to Prague — where he quarreled with another Kabbalah teacher devoted to Shabbetai Zevi, a false messiah — and later Wroclaw.
In past years, as many as 300 people at a time have visited the Istanbul cemetery. (David I. Klein)
After a life filled with struggle in Europe, Katz tried to emigrate to the holy land but only made it as far as Constantinople, where he died in 1718, and was buried by the local Jewish community in the Ortaköy Cemetery.
Ever since, the grave has been a site of pilgrimage, explained Rabbi Mendy Chitrik, an Istanbul rabbi affiliated with the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement — and another distant descendent of Katz’s — who helped in the restoration of the grave in 2005.
“Throughout the ages some great rabbis have allegedly made the pilgrimage,” Chitrik said, including the Baal Shem Tov — the founder of the Hasidic Judaism — Rabbi Nachman of Breslov and others.
“I have accompanied great rabbis who came anonymously to pray at his grave,” Chitrik added. “Some fly in for a day on private jets and leave.”
While some people come throughout the year, the most popular time to come is Katz’s yahrzeit, the 24th of Tevet on the Hebrew calendar. In past years, as many as 300 people came for the occasion, said Albert Elvaşvili, the president of the Ortaköy Jewish community which manages the cemetery.
However, he noted that attendance often rises and falls with the changes in Israeli-Turkish relations, much like general Israeli tourism to Turkey, which reached an all time high this year.
The biggest slump came during the COVID-19 pandemic, with only a handful of pilgrims coming the last two years. Now it seems that the tradition is once more back in force, with several buses of pilgrims from different countries and sects coming throughout the day.
“As relations with Israel and the Jewish people are coming to a better place, I believe there will be many more people coming in, and as Turkey becomes much more attractive for the Jewish and religious traveler, there will be many more opportunities for people to come,” Chitrik said. “Not just to the kever [grave] of Naphtali Katz on the 24th of Tevet, but to Rabbi Chaim Palachi in Izmir, on the 19th of Shevat, next month, and Rabbi Yehudah Rozanes, on the 26th of Nisan, and many other rabbis who are buried here in the important cemeteries of Turkey.”
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Israel Becomes World’s 7th Largest Arms Exporter
Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, on display during a visit by US President Joe Biden. Photo: Ariel Hermoni / Ministry of Defense
Israel has become the world’s seventh-largest arms exporter, steadily increasing its share of global weapons sales even amid a multi-front war and mounting international criticism, according to a new report.
On Monday, the Swedish-based Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released its latest report on global arms exports, analyzing trends from the last five years (2021–2025) and comparing them with the previous period (2016–2020).
For the first time, Israel has surpassed Great Britain to become the world’s seventh-largest arms exporter, with its share of global weapons sales rising to 4.4 percent in 2021–2025, up from 3.1 percent in the previous period.
“Despite conducting the war in Gaza and attacks in Iran, Lebanon, Qatar, Syria, and Yemen, Israel still managed to increase its share of global arms exports,” Zain Hussain, researcher at SIPRI’s Arms Transfers Program, said in a statement.
According to the newly released report, Israel also ranked as the 14th-largest arms importer in the world, acquiring most of its weapons from the United States (68 percent) and Germany (31 percent), with a small share from Italy (1 percent), showing that arms embargoes and international criticism have done little to slow its defense trade.
Overall, the total volume of the global arms trade rose by 9.2 percent in the last five years compared to the previous period, with European nations more than tripling their weapons imports to become the world’s largest arms-importing region amid rising regional tensions with Russia and escalating conflict in the Middle East.
The US continued to be the world’s largest arms exporter in 2021–2025, holding a 42 percent share of global sales, followed by France (9.8 percent), Russia (6.8 percent), Germany (5.7 percent), China (5.6 percent), Italy (5.1 percent), and Israel.
Among Middle Eastern countries, Saudi Arabia leads as the top purchaser of American arms with 12 percent of sales, followed by Qatar and Kuwait, while Israel ranks 12th globally, receiving just 3.1 percent of all US arms exports
SIPRI’s latest report comes as the Jewish state faces growing international pressure, with European states among the most vocally critical and threatening arms embargoes over Israel’s defensive war against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza and its military campaign against Iran.
Despite these threats, Israel’s arms exports have continued to grow, solidifying its position as a leading player in the global weapons market.
For example, the UK and Germany have pressed ahead with arms purchases from Israel despite repeated threats and public warnings to suspend defense trade, signaling the limits of international pressure.
Israel now supplies 8.2 percent of British arms purchases, second only to the US, which accounts for 85 percent.
In Israel’s biggest-ever arms export deal, Germany recently acquired the Arrow missile defense system, marking the largest weapons sale in the country’s history.
According to the SIPRI report, Israel’s growth in global arms exports was driven primarily by international sales of air defense systems, even as the country faced heavy domestic demand for weapons amid a multi-front war.
Overall, Israel sold arms to 23 European countries (41 percent of its total exports), 10 Asian countries (40 percent), five in North and Latin America (8.6 percent), and seven African nations.
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The Media Takes Sides in the Iran War — and It’s Usually Sympathetic to Iran
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting in Tehran, Iran, Feb. 1, 2026. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
Who could forget The Washington Post‘s foolish unforced error in 2019 when its obituary for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed Caliph of ISIS, called him an “austere religious scholar“?
Apparently, the editors at the Post forgot, because they printed an obituary for the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei that makes its praise for al-Baghdadi look restrained.
It portrays Khamenei as a modest man, quoting him as saying “I consider myself a common religious student without any outstanding feature or special advantage,” and provides details on his reading habits.
It even claims that Khamenei “declared [nuclear weapons] to be forbidden by Islam” and quotes him as saying he “issued a fatwa, based on Islamic teachings, forbidding the production of nuclear weapons.”
“With his bushy white beard and easy smile, Ayatollah Khamenei cut a more avuncular figure in public than his perpetually scowling but much more revered mentor,” author of the obituary William Branigin gushes.
The New York Times
The New York Times obituary writers, Alan Cowell and Farnaz Fassihi, must have been reading from the same set of notes when they wrote that Khamenei “affected an avuncular and magnanimous aloofness, running the country from a perch above the jousting of daily politics.”
They portray Khamenei as an effective leader who “lacked his predecessor’s charisma and mystique” but “cannily exploited political instabilities in the Middle East to extend Iran’s reach.”
Like Branigin, Cowell and Fassihi claim that “nuclear arms … were banned by the ayatollah in a 2003 religious edict.”
Obituaries are handled by the news division at The Wall Street Journal. It’s hard to imagine the Editor of the Editorial Page, Paul A. Gigot, approving Sune Engel Rasmussen’s Khamenei obituary, which opens with a sentence identifying him as “Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the austere cleric who ruled Iran for more than three decades and reshaped the balance of power across the Middle East.”
And while Rasmussen doesn’t call Khamenei “avuncular,” he describes him as “A pragmatist as well as an ideologue” who “endorsed diplomacy when convenient” and held a “popelike position in the Shiite Muslim world: elected by a council of elders to convey the word of God.”
He even goes so far as to credit Khamenei with making “progress in some important areas” including offering “some of the best healthcare and education in the region” and “boost[ing] female literacy rates.”
Like his peers at the Post and New York Times, Rasmussen also appears to accept uncritically Khamenei’s insistence that “the program was peaceful” and mentions that he “issued a religious pronouncement asserting that Iran wouldn’t acquire nuclear arms.”
What could compel journalists to praise an avowed enemy of the US, ignore his lies, downplay his nuclear program, and overlook his slaughter of thousands of Iranians and his genocidal campaign to destroy Israel?
Khamenei the Diplomat
The Khamenei-as-diplomat portrayal in the obituaries of the three most important American newspapers revolves around Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the so-called “Iran nuclear deal” that rewarded Iran handsomely for doing very little and set the stage for a legal Iranian nuclear bomb.
All three obituaries misrepresent the JCPOA through both omission and commission.
First, the errors of commission.
The Washington Post states that the JCPOA “restricted Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the easing of crippling economic sanctions.” The New York Times claims that it “restricted Iran’s right to enrich uranium in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions.” And The Wall Street Journal claims that it “granted Iran relief from sanctions in return for restrictions on its uranium enrichment program.”
The error here is that Iran’s “restrictions” were largely self-imposed and self-policed. Unlike Ronald Reagan’s “trust but verify” approach to negotiations, Obama naively agreed to Iranian “self-inspections” of sensitive military sites.
In terms of omission, none of the three obituaries acknowledges the fact that had the US not withdrawn from the JCPOA and reinstated the “maximum pressure” sanctions, Iran’s nuclear program would be mostly legal by now due to the JCPOA’s sunset clauses.
Trump the Villain
Each obituary frames the US withdrawal from the JCPOA as evidence of Trump’s belligerence.
The New York Times is the most direct of the three with the claim that Khamenei’s “mistrust was validated three years later, however, when Mr. Trump withdrew from the agreement, restoring sanctions and piling on new ones.”
The Wall Street Journal puts the sense of validation in Khamanei’s mouth: “After President Trump in 2018 withdrew from the historic nuclear pact that Iran struck with global powers in 2015, Khamenei said he was vindicated.”
But The Washington Post actually provides cover for Khamenei’s rush for nuclear breakout capacity and crossing the 90% enrichment threshold, with the claim that after Trump voided Obama’s agreement, “In retaliation, Iran began disregarding some provisions of the nuclear deal.”
In fact, Khamenei had been breaking the JCPOA from the very start. None of the three obituaries reminds its readers of that fact.
The obituaries also subtly attempt to downplay Khamenei’s desire for nuclear weapons, believing, it seems, his lie that the Islamic Republic is only interested in nuclear energy.
None asks why Iran denied IAEA inspectors access to the nuclear enrichment facilities it built deep underground or why a peaceful nuclear energy program would need underground facilities. None mentions that nuclear energy requires uranium enrichment of about 5% whereas Iran has admitted to having 460 kg of uranium at 60% enrichment.
Khamenei’s obituaries come as no surprise to anyone who follows media bias and understands how journalists increasingly side with America’s enemies in general and our Islamist enemies in particular.
While claims that journalists are the enemies of the American people are hyperbolic, the Khamenei obituaries show that many of them are not the enemies of our enemies. The Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal have demonstrated that they are not interested in portraying the world’s number one supporter of terrorism, a man who has killed thousands of his own countrymen and women and threatened to wipe America off the map, as the villain that he was, preferring instead to humanize him.
Chief Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) Political Correspondent A.J. Caschetta is a principal lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum where he is also a Milstein fellow. A version of this article was originally published by IPT.
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Australia’s Largest Arts Festival to Open With Wave of Anti-Israel Artists, Led by Controversial Creative Director
A view of Sydney, Australia. Photo: Reuters/David Gray.
The 25th edition of the Sydney Biennale, Australia’s largest arts festival, opens to the public on Saturday and will feature a slew of artists with anti-Israel views similar to those expressed by the festival’s artistic director, Emirati princess and curator Hoor Al-Qasimi.
The 25th Biennale of Sydney, which will take place from March 14-June 14 across multiple venues, receives taxpayer funding and support from the federal government of Australia, the state government of New South Wales, and the City of Sydney. However, several of the festival’s other partners and sponsors may be problematic for supporters of Israel.
Qatar Museums and Rubaiya Qatar, a new nationwide contemporary art quadrennial that will debut in November 2026, are the festival’s “major strategic” sponsors, according to the event’s website. Qatar has a long history of aligning itself with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, providing a home for the senior leaders of both organizations.
Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood are both internationally designated terrorist organizations. In the US, Hamas has carried the label for years, and the Trump administration has, in recent months, proscribed branches of the Muslim Brotherhood in Africa and the Middle East.
The festival’s “major partners” include the global property developer Arada, co-founded by Al-Qasimi’s brother-in-law, Sheikh Sultan bin Ahmed Al Qasimi. When the partnership was announced in November 2025, it caused significant concern among the Jewish community. Another partner of the festival, the Barjeel Art Foundation, is controlled by the princess’s family.
“There were grave concerns that the appointment of Hoor Al Qasimi would result in one of our flagship cultural institutions becoming a tool of ideology and exclusion,” Alex Ryvchin, co-chief executive of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, said last year, as cited by The Australian Financial Review. “The announcement that Al Qasimi’s family is now financially sponsoring the festival increases those concerns significantly, given that the family has a record of villainizing Israelis and calling for their boycott. The immense creative and financial power the family now exerts over the festival is alarming and risks undermining the spirit of the festival.”
Al Qasimi is the daughter of the ruler of Sharjah, one of seven emirates that comprise the United Arab Emirates. She is also the founder, president, and director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, an independent public arts organization in the UAE. She has a history of making anti-Israel comments and declaring “Free Palestine.”
When she was the artistic director of Japan’s Aichi Triennale in 2025, she said, “I didn’t imagine we would be witnessing a genocide live-streamed through our phones … this ongoing violence that can no longer be ignored … we all live under the same sky and none of us are free until all of us are free.” She also talked about “ongoing ethnic cleansing, and genocides.”
In October 2023, shortly after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel, she signed an open letter that voiced support for “Palestinian liberation.” The same open letter called for an end to Israel’s “human rights violations and war crimes” and “escalating genocide” in the “occupied and besieged Gaza Strip.” It further talked about “oppression,” “occupation,” and the “collective punishment of Gaza civilians,” but made no mention of the deadly rampage on Oct. 7 in which Hamas-led terrorists killed 1,200 Israelis and kidnaped 251 hostages.
Al Qasimi father also reportedly once said that “the Zionist presence in Palestine is a cancerous growth within the heart of the Arab nation.” Sheikha Jawaher Bint Mohammed Al Qasimi additionally “criticized the UAE’s cooperation with Israel in the education field,” according to The Middle East Monitor.
The Australian Financial Review reported that several donors and sponsors withdrew their support from the 2026 Sydney Biennale in response to Al Qasimi’s appointment. Al Qasimi’s decision to pick mostly pro-Palestinian artists for the Sydney Biennale also prompted the Carla Zampatti Foundation to withdraw funding for the festival, according to The Australian. In January 2026, Sydney Biennale ambassador Bhenji Ra cut ties with the festival after she faced criticism from the Jewish community over social media posts, including one message she shared that said, “Genocidal death cults do not have the right to exist.”
THE ARTISTS
The theme for this year’s Sydney Biennale is “Rememory,” a term adopted from Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1987 novel Beloved to describe “how we become subjects and storytellers of our collective present through events of the past.”
Out of the 83 artists and collections from 37 countries being featured in the 25th Sydney Biennale, more than half are Arab and Muslim and no Israeli artists are included the lineup. The only Jewish talent participating is New York-based Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz, who has publicly made anti-Israel comments. In 2017, Rakowitz described his art as a form of “sumud,” an Arabic term meaning resilience, to “not allow Zionism to loot everything from the imagination, to keep alive the reality of what the Middle East was like before.”
French-Lebanese artist, DJ, and embroiderer Nasri Sayegh is also featured in this year’s Biennale, and he previously posted on social media that “Jewish supremacy is a disease.”
Richard Bell, an Australian artist showcasing his work in the festival, posted content on social media that has accused Israel of “genocide” in Gaza and been critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In an Instagram Story on Wednesday, he shared a video from Middle East Eye of an economics professor accusing Israel and the United States of a “mass murder of civilians” in Iran, and indiscriminately “carpet bombing Tehran.”
In August 2025, Bell shared a message on Instagram that said in part, “colonial societies target children because they want to take away the future … it is happening in Gaza, where children are being starved to death.” He previously created a large painting in the shape and colors of the Palestinian flag and the piece was titled “From the River to the Sea,” a slogan that is widely interpreted as a call for the destruction of Israel and for it to be replaced with “Palestine.”
Aysenur Kara is an “emerging Turkish artist” featured in this year’s Sydney Biennale who “aims to use her material conceptions to platform those facing genocide in Gaza right now,” according to a description provided on the festival’s website. The festival additionally said that another one of its presenters, Palestinian artist Khalil Rabah, uses his work “to articulate the very real situation of occupation experienced by Palestinians.”
A series of photographs by Iranian photographer Hoda Afsha being featured in the Sydney Biennale depicts indigenous children who had been in the juvenile justice system and was inspired by the fate of children during the “genocide in Palestine.” In late October 2023 – the same month as the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel – the award-winning Melbourne-based photographer posted on Instagram that she wants “Zionists out of our cultural spaces.”
Palestinian-Australian artist Feras Shaheen will put on the dance performance “Blocked Duwar” at the Campbelltown Arts Centre as part of the 2026 Sydney Biennale. In September 2025, the Tasmanian-based artist compared Jewish businessmen to Nazis in a social media post. He uploaded a photo that said, “Treat your local Zionist like you treat your local Nazi: Equality.” The message was featured over images of neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell, and Jewish arts philanthropist John Gandel and former Biennale donor and board member Morry Schwartz.
Photo: Screenshot
Schwartz responded to Shaheen’s social media post in an open letter last year to Kate Mills, chairman of the Biennale of Sydney. “I’m sure you’ll agree with me that a line has been crossed,” Schwartz wrote. “To equate John Gandel and me with Nazis is shocking. The Biennale will not survive this if you don’t act immediately.”
The offensive social media post has not been taken down by Shaheen.
Schwartz told The Australian Financial Review Magazine he had withdrawn his support for the Sydney Biennale, worried that its artistic director might turn the event into a “hate-Israel jamboree.”
Jewish leaders were given the opportunity to preview the Biennale of Sydney but declined the offer after being frustrated that the festival’s senior figures took no action against “objectionable” social media posts by artists included in the event, The Daily Telegraph reported this week.