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Orthodox Union will meet with Israel’s far-right finance minister, while Conservative and Reform movements join call to snub him
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The leading institutions of the Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist movements are among a coalition of liberal Jewish groups calling on American Jews to snub Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far-right finance minister, when he visits the United States next week.
But the Orthodox Union, an umbrella organization for Orthodox Jews, has confirmed to JTA that it will meet with Smotrich.
The non-Orthodox groups were among more than 70 organizations to sign an open letter denouncing Smotrich. About half of the signatories on the letter, which was published Thursday, are synagogues. It was organized by the Progressive Israel Network, a coalition of groups that support progressive policies in Israel, after Smotrich said earlier this month that a Palestinian village should be “wiped out.” He has since repeatedly walked back the statement.
The Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist umbrella groups represent the vast majority of synagogue-attending U.S. Jews and, in previous years, have welcomed senior Israeli officials to their events. Their presence on the open letter underscores the extent to which Smotrich and his far-right allies have alarmed parts of the organized American Jewish community.
“We pledge to not invite Smotrich to speak at our congregations, organizations, and communal institutions during his visit and to speak out against his participation in other fora across our communities,” the letter says. “We call on all other Jewish communal organizations to join us in this protest as a demonstration of our commitment to our Jewish and democratic values. Our communities must reject Bezalel Smotrich and his party of hate.”
The boycott by the Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist groups stands in contrast to the O.U., whose executive vice president, Rabbi Moshe Hauer, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he believes Smotrich “will use the opportunity to build greater understanding of and familiarity with the American Jewish community and its institutions.”
“We look forward to welcoming Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich to our offices as part of his forthcoming visit to the United States,” Hauer said in a statement. “We appreciate every opportunity to welcome and interact with Israeli elected officials as it is our responsibility to build mutual familiarity and understanding that will contribute to the deepening and strengthening of the relationship between the State of Israel and American Jewry.”
Another Orthodox group, Agudath Israel of America, has no plans at this time to meet with Smotrich, its Washington director, Rabbi Abba Cohen, told JTA.
Smotrich arrives Sunday to speak to Israel Bonds, which sells Israeli government bonds to investors abroad and is closely tied to the Finance Ministry. Smotrich is also responsible for civilian affairs in parts of the West Bank, which he has called to annex to Israel. He also supports the judicial reform being advanced by the Israeli government, which would sap the Supreme Court of much of its power.
Smotrich has a history of remarks denigrating minorities. But he has drawn especially harsh criticism over the past week and a half after saying that the Israel Defense Forces should “wipe out” a West Bank village, Huwara, where a gunman killed two Israeli brothers. Israeli settlers rioted in Huwara following the attack, burning buildings and cars, and injuring residents. A Palestinian died amid the riots.
In the wake of Smotrich’s statement, the Biden administration said it would not meet with him. In recent days, Smotich has repeatedly walked back the “wipe out” remark, and his latest disavowal came in a lengthy and impassioned Facebook post on Wednesday. Smotrich wrote that a friend who is an Israeli combat pilot explained that Smotrich’s call to destroy Huwara could be taken literally, and that pilots believed they could get orders to bomb the village. Smotrich said his friend linked that concern to a recent decision by 37 reservist combat pilots to boycott part of their training. The main aim of that boycott was to protest the planned judicial reform.
Smotrich said that he meant, at most, that buildings lining the road through Huwara, which is a main West Bank throughway, should be removed.
“And so after I failed in this responsibility, and believe me I am still rattled by the thought that I was understood this way, I must apologize to the army and its commanders, especially to the Air Force, if I was part of a breach of the important trust between the Israel Defense Forces, the army of the people, and the elected political echelon,” Smotrich said.
He added that the experience of being misunderstood by his ideological opponents has made him consider how he may have misjudged those he disagrees with.
“If there is a giant gap between who I am and how I am perceived on ‘the other side,’ to the extent that I could be accused of calling for the murder of women and children, who knows what kind of gap exists between how I perceive people… on the other side, and who and what they really are?” he wrote. “Maybe I make the exact same mistake.”
His apologies have done little to assuage concerns. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, meeting Thursday with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant, alluded to the Smotrich dilemma when he decried inflammatory rhetoric as well as violence by settlers and Palestinian terrorists.
“I am here as a friend who is deeply committed to the security of the State of Israel. The United States also remains firmly opposed to any acts that contribute more insecurity, including settlement expansion, and inflammatory rhetoric,” Austin said. “And we’re especially concerned by violence by settlers against Palestinians.”
A number of other groups are not planning to meet with Smotrich, but would not elaborate further. Most prominent among them is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Haaretz reported Thursday that two rabbis known for their closeness to AIPAC the pro-Israel lobby, have joined protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government, and Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party in particular. An array of left-leaning Jewish groups is planning to picket Smotrich’s speech.
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The post Orthodox Union will meet with Israel’s far-right finance minister, while Conservative and Reform movements join call to snub him appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Netanyahu pushes back on Vance’s claims that US is Israel’s ‘only powerful ally’
(JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected Vice President JD Vance’s recent claims that the U.S. is Israel’s “only powerful ally” left in the world.
When asked on Fox News Sunday what his reaction was to Vance’s remarks, which came as Israeli ministers criticized the framework deal signed by the U.S. and Iran to end hostilities, Netanyahu replied, “I respect JD Vance. We have a very good relationship, but that doesn’t mean that I agree with everything that he says.”
“I have to point out this: Donald Trump is a great, the greatest friend we ever had in the White House, and I stand by that completely,” Netanyahu continued. “Secondly, we have some other friends, like a small country called India, you know, it has 1.4 billion people, and boy, do we have a tremendous support there.”
Netanyahu added that Israel also has the support of “many others,” but did not elaborate on which countries he was referring to.
“The relations are not quite as they appear, and we have, we have many, many friends, and I have to tell you, we also take care of our friends, especially the Christians in the Middle East,” Netanyahu said.
The prime minister also dismissed the claim that there was any rift between the United States and Israel regarding the deal with Iran, telling Fox that he and President Donald Trump were “set on the same goal.”
“President Trump is the leader of the United States. He does what’s good for America. I’m the leader of Israel, the one and only Jewish state. I do what’s good for Israel,” Netanyahu said. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, we see eye to eye, but as any, in any family, in any close friendship, there are sometimes differences of opinion, and we discuss them openly.”
Netanyahu also said that he and Trump have “common objectives” regarding the U.S. deal with Iran.
“We want to see Iran give up its nuclear weapons program. We want to see the nuclear enriched material removed. We want to see the enrichment sites for nuclear material dismantled,” Netanyahu said, adding, “as long as I’m prime minister, Iran will not have nuclear weapons.”
On Saturday, Trump told Axios that Netanyahu had requested a meeting at the White House and said that the pair gets along “very good” and that the Israeli leader “knows who the boss is.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Netanyahu pushes back on Vance’s claims that US is Israel’s ‘only powerful ally’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Former Israeli hostages Sasha Trufanov and Sapir Cohen wed in emotional ceremony
(JTA) — Two former Israeli hostages have wed, in the first marriage of hostages taken when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Sasha Trufanov and Sapir Cohen were visiting Trufanov’s family on Kibbutz Nir Oz on Oct. 7 when they were attacked and abducted to Gaza. Trufanov’s father was murdered. Cohen was freed during a temporary ceasefire after 55 days, while Trufanov was held for nearly 500 days.
They married on Sunday in Israel, in a ceremony attended by multiple former hostages as well as Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who posted a picture of himself under the chuppah, or wedding canopy, with Trufanov and Cohen.
“We prayed for your return, we were moved to tears when you came back home, and this evening we were privileged to rejoice together with you and to bless you under the chuppah on your joyous day,” Herzog wrote.
While other freed hostages have celebrated births and engagements, the wedding is the first for a former hostage. It comes just days after Israel marked the 1,000th day since Oct. 7, and as the government’s handling of the hostage crisis continues to roil Israeli politics ahead of a looming election. Last week, Nitzan Alon, an Israeli army major general who was part of a small hostage negotiation team, said at a conference that more hostages could have been returned alive had the Israeli government made different decisions, strengthening a widespread belief within Israel.
Alon, too, was present at Trufanov and Cohen’s wedding.
After Trufanov stepped on a glass, the traditional signal for the execution of the marriage, Eyal Golan’s “Am Yisrael Chai,” an anthem of Jewish and Israeli solidarity during the Gaza war, began playing.
Rom Braslavski, another hostage who was briefly held with Trufanov in Gaza, posted pictures of himself with his friend at the wedding, as well as a video of him and the newly married couple being hoisted to dance.
“Today, we are together, not in Rafah, not stuffed in a trunk, but free and you are in a beautiful groom’s suit marrying Sapir. How much you talked about her, my brother,” he wrote on Instagram. “There is nothing happier for me than accompanying you on this day, and I hope both of you will bring into the world happy little children and that they won’t know evil. May they not know war, with God’s help.”
Another wedding featuring a former hostage is scheduled for next month. Eliya Cohen, who was held for 505 days, marked his engagement to Ziv Abud in a party that took place last week. He wore a jacket that read “Bring them Home” when other grooms wore it during the hostage crisis. With all hostages out of Gaza since January, Cohen altered it to read “Dad, thank you,” a mantra that he said sustained him during his captivity.
Cohen did not know that Abud had survived the attack on the Nova music festival until after his release. While he was held hostage, she drew attention to his plight by setting a romantic table with an unfilled place on the boardwalk in Tel Aviv.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Former Israeli hostages Sasha Trufanov and Sapir Cohen wed in emotional ceremony appeared first on The Forward.
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Hundreds of Patriot Front members march in Washington on July 4, alarming Jewish groups
(JTA) — Hundreds of people affiliated with the white supremacist group Patriot Front marched in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, in a July 4 show of force by the group founded by a veteran of a landmark 2017 far-right rally that featured an antisemitic chant.
The marchers in Washington wore masks and some carried Confederate flags, according to reports and video from the scene. At times, they chanted “Reclaim America!” — a rallying cry channeling the group’s nativist agenda.
While Patriot Front’s public activities mostly center on its anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ agenda, the Anti-Defamation League has repeatedly cited the group, founded in 2017, as the largest purveyor of antisemitic materials in the United States.
One of the group’s signature slogans, which members displayed on a banner in Washington in 2023, is “No Zionists in Government.”
The previous year, the group’s internal communications, obtained and leaked by an independent media collective, showed that some members used Nazi slogans and that one member was accepted on the basis of an application in which he declared that the “biggest threat to America is Jewish domination over the world.” Group leaders criticized how the chat logs had been obtained but did not challenge the veracity of their contents.
In a statement on Sunday, the ADL called Patriot Front “the most visible white supremacist group operating in the U.S. today” and noted that its previous public rallies had been much smaller.
“The size of the march is concerning,” the ADL said about the Saturday rally.
Patriot Front’s founder, Thomas Rousseau, was a leading participant in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which attendees chanted “Jews will not replace us” while carrying burning torches. The chant refers to an antisemitic conspiracy theory positing that Jews are engineering mass immigration in order to displace white people. Rousseau later testified that he heard the chant but thought attendees might have been saying “you will not replace us.”
The 2017 rally fueled criticism of President Donald Trump, who did not immediately comment on it and then placed blame on “both sides” while condemning the display of “hatred, bigotry and violence.” It also animated the presidential run of Joe Biden and spurred a successful lawsuit against the rally’s organizers by an advocacy group called Integrity First for America, whose leader, Amy Spitalnick, is now CEO of the Jewish Council on Public Affairs.
“Patriot Front is an offshoot of one of the white supremacist groups we (successfully) sued for orchestrating the Charlottesville violence,” Spitalnick said in a JCPA statement on Sunday. “They are emboldened because their extremism has been wholly normalized by the administration and others.”
Trump has not commented publicly on this weekend’s Patriot Front march, which took place during festivities to celebrate the United States’ 250th birthday. A top administration official did not directly answer when CNN’s Dana Bash asked him whether he would urge Trump to denounce the group.
“What they stand for is nothing that I could possibly agree with,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum told Bash, who is Jewish and has made antisemitism a focus of her recent coverage. “But one of the foundational principles of the United States, which makes democracy messy, is free speech.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Hundreds of Patriot Front members march in Washington on July 4, alarming Jewish groups appeared first on The Forward.
