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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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Jewish authors get a lifeline
Susan Blumberg-Kason, a Jewish author whose work explores Jewish history and identity, was deep into a book about Golda Meir’s Milwaukee childhood when her literary agent abruptly dropped her early last year.
The agent offered only a vague explanation, saying, “We can no longer champion your career.”
Blumberg-Kason was surprised at the 180-degree turn by an agent who had been with her for years. But she soon discovered three other Jewish writers in her online community also had been suddenly dropped by their agents with little explanation other than the same phrase she heard: “We can no longer champion your career.”
It didn’t feel like coincidence.
“It wasn’t just that she dropped me,” Blumberg-Kason said. “It was that suddenly several of us were hearing the exact same sentence. It felt coordinated. It felt like something had shifted under our feet.”
It turns out many other Jewish writers have had similar experiences over the past two years, since the beginning of the Oct. 7 war and the boom in anti-Israel and antisemitic ferment that followed. In writers’ groups and forums, Jewish authors describe a sense that their work is being railroaded because they are Jewish. They’ve lost agents, publishers and book events. Some report that editors have cooled the moment Jewish themes appeared in their work.
In May 2024, anti-Israel boycotters propagated a shared spreadsheet called “Is your fav author a Zionist?” that went viral, “outing” Jewish writers for any kind of connection to Israel.
Author Elissa Wald felt the anti-Jewish sentiment so strongly that she created the Never Alone Book Club for Jewish authors to give one another support. The group now has 3,500 members, a Facebook community and a Substack, and it hosts Jewish book events and shares resources for writers who no longer feel safe in mainstream literary spaces.
The challenging climate prompted UJA-Federation of New York to begin funding projects aimed at helping Jewish authors, awarding a total of $300,000 in grants to six organizations working in different areas of the literary ecosystem.
“Supporting Jewish writers is an important part of UJA’s overall strategy to confront rising antisemitism,” said Eric S. Goldstein, CEO of UJA-Federation of New York. “Efforts to marginalize Jewish voices in culture and the arts must be met by even greater efforts to ensure they’re heard.”
The organizations receiving UJA grants are helping Jewish writers with everything from publishing logistics and visibility to offering emotional support.
“Jewish writers were being dropped, disinvited, and sidelined — and many were questioning whether they could continue writing Jewish stories,” said Rina Cohen, who manages strategy across UJA’s Combating Antisemitism portfolio. “By supporting them with tools and resources, UJA is sending a clear message: You deserve to create freely, and we’ll stand behind you as you do.”
The Jewish Book Council used funding from UJA for a unique program to kick off the 100th anniversary of Jewish Book Month: The council designed and distributed 100 Jewish Book Kits to libraries and public spaces across New York City that offer a curated selection of Jewish literature, visual displays, QR codes and author highlights. The aim is to give librarians and community centers an accessible way to showcase Jewish books, helping make Jewish writing visible in the very spaces where many writers feared their work was being erased.
“Jewish books need visibility,” said Jewish Book Council CEO Naomi Firestone-Teeter. “We said: Let’s bring more Jewish books out into the world — into more readers’ hands — and build community around them. That’s what the kits do. They let people see Jewish books where they live their lives.”
It’s not always clear that a Jewish writer’s professional setback stems from antisemitism. Publishing is a brutal industry, and even successful writers experience abrupt and opaque rejection.
But many Jewish writers say that what they’re experiencing suggests something nefarious. They’ve felt their Jewishness was treated as suspect in classrooms, critique groups or conferences. They’ve felt pressure from editors to strip Jewish elements from their work.
When the Jewish Book Council opened a portal inviting Jewish writers to share incidents affecting their creative or professional lives, over 400 authors wrote in.
“Some of what we see is subtle and hard to pinpoint, and some of it is very direct: events canceled, students pushed out of MFA programs for being ‘Zionists,’ bookstores refusing to stock books,” Firestone-Teeter said. “Things are not okay. This is not just the normal difficulty of publishing.”
In addition to the Jewish Book Council, UJA’s other five grants went to Artists Against Antisemitism, PJ Library, the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Jewish Life Foundation and 70 Faces Media (the parent organization of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency).
In October, 70 Faces Media held a one-day Jewish Authors’ Summit, offering writers practical tools, digital strategy training and community-building to navigate this increasingly hostile publishing environment.
PJ library will hold a Jewish children’s book festival for authors and families at New York’s 92nd St. Y on Jan. 11, 2026. In just the first few days, an unprecedented 3,500 registrants signed up.
The Jewish Theological Seminary held a literary festival in September that brought together 450 writers, students and community members for masterclasses, public panels and craft development.
The Jewish Life Foundation is creating a TV and podcast series, “The People of the Book with Josh Radnor,” that will spotlight Jewish authors and conversations about Jewish identity and culture.
Artists Against Antisemitism created a full-day gathering for 140 authors, the Jewish Writers Mifgash, that included pitch sessions with literary agents, professional development workshops, mentorship matching and mental health support. Project Shema, a training and support organization focused on contemporary antisemitism, led a session at the conference on how to recognize antisemitism in creative spaces.
Elizabeth Berkowitz, one of the event’s organizers, said several authors came away with promising leads.
“Agents were asking, ‘Can you send me the full? I want to see more,’” Berkowitz said. “We definitely had some shidduchs made — real follow-ups between writers and agents who were actively seeking Jewish authors.”
Zeeva Bukai, a longtime editor who said she’d experienced open hostility in a professional editing group, said just being around others experiencing the same challenges was a welcome relief.
“I realized it’s not just me experiencing this; other are too,” she said. “That validation was just as important as the tools we learned to deal with it.”
That’s the point, said the Jewish Book Council’s CEO.
“We want authors to know we’ve got you on the other side,” Firestone-Teeter said. “Your job is to keep writing. Our job is to deal with the industry issues and build a community that celebrates you and your work. Jewish writers need to feel confident writing the books only they can write.”
The post Jewish authors get a lifeline appeared first on The Forward.
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Iceland joins 4 other countries in boycotting Eurovision over Israel’s participation
(JTA) — The public broadcaster of Iceland announced on Wednesday that it will not participate in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest after Israel’s participation was confirmed by the European Broadcasting Union last week.
The decision drew support from prominent Icelandic artists, including the singer Björk and the former Eurovision representative Paul Oscar, as well as a supportive rally outside of the broadcaster’s Reykjavik headquarters.
The decision by the Icelandic public broadcaster Ríkisútvarpið, or RÚV, makes it the fifth country to bow out of the competition, following similar calls made by the public broadcasters of Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands and Slovenia. RÚV first signaled it would boycott competition with Israel in September.
The boycott decisions came after the EBU, which organizes the competition, dismissed calls for a vote on Israel’s participation last week. Instead, the EBU approved a new set of rules prohibiting voter interference from governments and third parties following allegations that Israel interfered in last year’s competition.
In a press release Wednesday, RÚV said its board had requested that the EBU remove Israel from the song competition, saying that such a move had the support of the Icelandic public.
“Given the public debate in this country and the reactions to the decision of the EBU that was taken last week it is clear that neither joy nor peace will prevail regarding the participation of RÚV in Eurovision,” it said in a press release. “It is therefore the conclusion of RÚV to notify the EBU today that RÚV will not take part in Eurovision next year.”
Iceland came in 25th out of 37 countries in the 2025 competition, where Israeli listeners noted that its song sounded remarkably similar to an Israeli pop hit. The Icelandic contestants denied knowing about the Israeli song before writing their own.
RÚV’s boycott decision came hours before the final deadline to withdraw from this year’s Eurovision, which is slated to take place in May in Vienna.
“We respect the decision of all broadcasters who have chosen not to participate in next year’s Eurovision Song Contest and hope to welcome them back soon,” said Eurovision director Martin Green in a statement, according to the BBC.
The post Iceland joins 4 other countries in boycotting Eurovision over Israel’s participation appeared first on The Forward.
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IDF Warns of Growing West Bank Threat, Presence of Iranian Weapons Amid Major Counterterror Operations
Israeli soldiers walk during an operation in Tubas, in the West Bank, Nov. 26, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is sounding the alarm over a growing terrorist threat from the West Bank, warning that Iranian-backed arms smuggling could spark an Oct. 7-style attack.
Concerns over the presence of significant Iranian-supplied firepower in the hands of Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank has prompted Israeli intelligence and security forces to intensify operations across the territory.
According to a new report from Israel’s Channel 14, a senior IDF official warned that the West Bank presents a growing threat to Israeli communities, with the potential to spark an attack similar to the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“We have to start from the clear fact that weapons in Judea and Samaria [Israel’s preferred name for the West Bank] could upset the current stalemate,” the IDF official told Channel 14.
However, while the military has prioritized preparing for large-scale scenarios, such as an Oct. 7-style attack, the senior IDF official also warned that more attention needs to be paid to “smaller” threats — like a situation in which a small group of terrorists infiltrates a settlement home and kills an entire family — an event he described as “highly probable.”
“We shouldn’t see this scenario only as an attack on dozens of communities. A single deadly strike is enough — we must also prepare for lethal, localized attacks,” the IDF official said. “Our responsibility is to protect both individuals and the broader community.”
He warned that terrorists in the West Bank are believed to possess arms capable of breaking Israeli defenses, including what he called “standard Iranian weapons.” However, he also noted that security forces are actively working to intercept these arms and dismantle any terrorist cell in the area.
On Tuesday, the IDF uncovered a major terrorist infrastructure in the Tulkarem area in the northern West Bank, including three rockets at various stages of assembly, explosive devices, operational equipment, and materials for making bombs.
According to Joe Truzman, a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington, DC-based think tank, Israeli officials should be closely monitoring the West Bank as the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas regroups and rearms in the Gaza Strip after two years of war.
“Hamas and its allied factions understand that igniting violence in the territory would divert Israel’s attention during a critical time of rebuilding the group’s infrastructure in Gaza,” Truzman said last month.
“The release of convicted terrorists to the West Bank under the ceasefire agreement may be a factor in the resurgence of organized violence in the territory,” he continued.
At the time, the IDF completed a three-day, multi-branch military exercise in the West Bank called “Lion’s Roar,” designed to enhance operational coordination and joint capabilities in the region, with scenarios shaped by lessons learned from the Oct. 7 atrocities.
More than 180 Israeli Air Force aircraft supported ground troops during training for over 40 scenarios, including attacks on outposts, simultaneous terrorist infiltrations into multiple communities, urban combat, mass-casualty rescue and medical evacuation, multi-casualty response, intelligence integration, and real-time command and control.
“We have many lessons to implement from this exercise and from Oct. 7,” the IDF spokesperson said in a statement at the time.
“The IDF will continue to conduct regular exercises to ensure high readiness, strengthen cooperation among all troops, and maintain the security of residents in the area and of all Israeli civilians,” the statement read.
According to a survey released earlier this year by the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, 70 percent of all respondents — and 81 percent of Jewish respondents — expressed fear of an Oct. 7-style attack coming from the West Bank. In contrast, 53 percent of Arab respondents said they were not worried about such an attack.
“The stipulations of the ceasefire in Gaza, mainly the requirement for Hamas to fully disarm in future phases, should also be applied to the terrorist organization’s operatives in the West Bank,” Aaron Goren, research analyst at FDD, said at the time.
“Otherwise, Israel may face a threat from Hamas, which, unlike in Gaza, where it is relatively contained, is dispersed amongst Israeli communities in the West Bank,” he continued.
Earlier this year, the IDF arrested a Hamas and Fatah terror cell from Ramallah that was planning a bombing attack on a bus in Jerusalem, with investigators saying the group intended to remotely detonate an explosive device smuggled into Israel.
As of February, Israeli security forces had foiled nearly 1,000 terrorist plots over the past year, with senior military officials increasingly worried that the volatile situation in the West Bank could lead to a large-scale attack similar to the Oct. 7 onslaught against Israeli settlements and communities near the security barrier.
In response to these concerns, the IDF has established a special command to address potential threats in the West Bank and launched a nearly unprecedented counterterror operation in the northern part of the territory.