Uncategorized
Rabbi Abraham Levy, influential leader among Britain’s Sephardic Jews, dies at 83
(JTA) — British Jews are mourning Rabbi Abraham Levy, who led London’s historic Spanish and Portuguese community for decades, building up multiple institutions serving Sephardic Jews in the process.
Levy died Dec. 24 at age 83, a decade after becoming emeritus spiritual head of the S&P Sephardi Community in London, following a 32-year period serving as the head rabbi.
“He was a man of God. A leader of religious life. And he did it with a great deal of conviction. He was a leader who was courageous and had integrity,” his successor, Rabbi Joseph Dweck, said during a special session held to memorialize Levy during the annual Limmud Festival of Jewish learning in Birmingham, England, which was underway when he died.
Levy had played a role in building the annual festival to its current status when, in its early days in the 1980s, his participation was unusual among Orthodox rabbis. Now, the festival is seen as an exemplar of pluralism.
“It is a huge loss for the whole of Anglo Jewry — he built our collective Judaism,” Dweck said. “He represented the Jewish community with such grace and eloquence. I am not sure how we replace that. When we were not sure what the Spanish and Portuguese custom was there was only one person we would ask — and that was him.”
Born in Gibraltar to an Orthodox family, Levy trained as a rabbi at London’s Jews’ College and also completed a doctorate at London University. He ascended to the top spot in London’s Spanish and Portuguese community in 1980.
During his tenure, Levy was responsible for opening Naima Jewish Preparatory School, the first Sephardi school in London since the early 20th century. He remained until his death the honorary principal of the school, which was located in London’s West End and enrolled a mixture of Anglo-Sephardi Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, and burgeoning numbers of Jews from Iran, Iraq and France in the late 1980s.
Levy is also credited with retaining Orthodox rabbinic ordination in England under the auspices of the Montefiore Endowment, after the body that had ordained him stopped minting new rabbis. He additionally created a leadership program for young Jews whose early graduates included Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Britain’s chief rabbi for 22 decades and a towering figure in contemporary Judaism.
Rabbi Abraham Levy led the S&P Sephardi Community in England for more than three decades. He is seen in prayer after his retirement. (Courtesy of Rabbi Joseph Dweck)
Rabbi Raphael Zarum, a graduate of the Montefiore rabbinic training program who is now dean of the London School of Jewish Studies, said Levy was gifted at integrating religious and secular ideas. There was, Zarum said, “a natural overlap for him… He would say, ‘We Sephardim do our jobs, we are part of the world and we are also close to our faith.’”
Levy took a lead role in Sepharad 92, the effort by the World Sephardi Federation to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Jewish expulsion from Spain and Portugal. His role included meeting heads of state and visiting Sephardic communities in Spain and Portugal.
As a member of England’s Council of Christians and Jews, Levy helped to foster positive relations between the faiths. Queen Elizabeth awarded him the OBE, Britain’s second-highest national award, for his interfaith relations work in 2004.
“Rabbi Levy will be profoundly missed, but his message of tolerance and his work toward interfaith dialogue hold enduring lessons for us all,” King Charles said in a statement. He said Levy had been his host when Charles visited the Bevis Marks Synagogue, the largest associated with the Sephardic community, for its 300th anniversary in 2o01.
“I knew him both as a kind and towering figure in his community and as a greatly respected and admired teacher across communities,” the king said in his statement.
Tributes also poured in from elsewhere in England, from British Jews of all backgrounds and even from the deputy mayor of Jerusalem, Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, who was a cousin. Hassan-Nahoum tweeted that Levy was “a great and proud Sefardi leader — who will be greatly missed.”
“Our community mourns the sad loss of Rabbi Dr Abraham Levy,” said the United Kingdom’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, in a statement. He “made his mark well beyond the Sephardi community. A committed rabbinic leader and outstanding scholar, he made a deep impact in interfaith relations and education.”
Levy was buried Dec. 26 in a cemetery in Golders Green, a predominantly Jewish neighborhood of London, after a funeral procession that included stops at the Naima school and the Lauderdale Road Synagogue, also part of the Sephardi community. He is survived by a son and four grandchildren.
—
The post Rabbi Abraham Levy, influential leader among Britain’s Sephardic Jews, dies at 83 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Poland Summons Israeli Ambassador Over Yad Vashem Post
Visitors tour an exhibition, ahead of Israel’s national Holocaust memorial day at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, in Jerusalem, April 23, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
Poland summoned Israel’s ambassador on Monday over a tweet from a Holocaust memorial institute that Warsaw said did not make clear that occupying Nazi German forces, and not Polish authorities, made Jews wear star badges during World War II.
Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski was protesting against a social media post in which Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial institution to the victims of the Holocaust, wrote that Poland was the first country where Jews were forced to wear “a distinctive badge to isolate them from the surrounding population.”
He said the post, published on Sunday, should have made clear Poland was “German-occupied” at the time.
“Since the misleading post has not been amended, I have decided to summon the ambassador of Israel to the foreign ministry,” Sikorski wrote on X.
The Israeli foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Yad Vashem had reposted the original tweet saying: “As noted by many users and specified explicitly in the linked article, it was done by order of the German authorities.”
Poland was occupied by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II, which lasted from 1939 to 1945. Warsaw takes pains to underline that the persecution of Jews on its territory, such as in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, was the work of the Nazi German occupiers.
More than three million of Poland‘s 3.2 million Jews were killed by Nazi Germany, accounting for about half of the Jews in Europe killed during the Holocaust.
“Yad Vashem presents the historical realities of Nazism and WW2, including countries under German occupation, control or influence. Poland was indeed under German occupation,” Dani Dayan, the chairman of Yad Vashem, wrote on X on Monday.
“This is clearly reflected in our material. Any other interpretation misreads our commitment to accuracy.”
Uncategorized
Gaza Truce Progress Slow as Israeli-Hamas Violence Persists
Palestinians walk among piles of rubble and damaged buildings in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, Nov. 24, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
Israeli forces killed three Palestinian terrorists in Gaza near the line demarcating areas of Israeli control on Monday, underlining the struggle to broaden a fragile ceasefire deal approved over six weeks ago to global acclaim.
Palestinian medics said Monday’s incidents involved an Israeli drone firing a missile at a group of people east of Khan Younis, killing two and wounding another, and a tank shell killing a person on the eastern side of Gaza City.
Israel’s military said it had fired after identifying what it described as “terrorists” crossing the so-called yellow line and approaching its troops, posing an immediate threat to them.
Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and Israel signed a truce on Oct. 9 halting two years of devastating warfare but the agreement left the most intractable disputes for further talks, freezing the conflict without resolving it.
Both sides have since accused each other of deadly breaches of existing commitments in the agreement and of pushing back against later steps required by US President Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza.
The Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, whose casualty figures have been described by experts as misleading and unreliable, said on Monday that at least 342 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli fire since the start of the truce. Israel says three of its soldiers have been killed by militant gunfire in the same period.
Last week, the United Nations Security Council gave formal backing to Trump’s plan, which calls for an interim technocratic Palestinian government in Gaza, overseen by an international “board of peace” and backed by an international security force.
Trump’s plan also requires reform of the Palestinian Authority, based in the West Bank.
NEGOTIATIONS
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who helped the US develop the plan and who Trump has said may join the board of peace, met the PA’s deputy leader Hussein al-Sheikh in the West Bank on Sunday.
Sheikh said in a social media post they had discussed developments following the Security Council resolution and requirements for Palestinian self-determination.
Meanwhile a Hamas delegation in Cairo, led by its exiled chief Khalil al-Hayya, held talks with Egyptian officials on exploring the next phase of the ceasefire, according to Hazem Qassem, a Hamas spokesperson in Gaza.
Qassem acknowledged that the path to the second phase of the ceasefire was complex and said the Islamist group had told Egypt, a mediator in the conflict, that Israeli violations were undermining the agreement.
Agreeing on the make-up and mandate of the international security force has been particularly challenging.
Israel has said the multinational force must disarm Hamas, a step the terrorist group has so far resisted without Palestinian statehood, which Trump’s plan broadly envisages as the ultimate stage but which Israel has ruled out. Qassem said the force must have a role in keeping Israel’s military away from Palestinian civilians.
“There is complete uncertainty; the Americans haven’t put forward a detailed plan. It is unclear what kind of forces, what their tasks are, what their roles are, and where they will be stationed,” said a Palestinian official close to the Cairo talks who spoke on condition that he was not further identified.
“Any deployment of forces without a political track, without an understanding with all Palestinian factions and powers in Gaza, would complicate things even further.”
Uncategorized
The Diplomatic Trojan Horse: How UN Resolution 2803 Quietly Turns the Negev into an International Zone
Illustrative: Members of the United Nations Security Council vote against a resolution by Russia and China to delay by six months the reimposition of sanctions on Iran during the 80th UN General Assembly in New York City, US, Sept. 26, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz
UN Security Council Resolution 2803 looks like the diplomatic victory Israel has been desperate for since the war began. It finally codifies the demilitarization of Gaza, establishes a US-led “Board of Peace” to manage reconstruction, and seemingly ends the chaos of the post-war vacuum. The Prime Minister called it “a secure horizon,” and the White House hailed it as a “new chapter.”
But if you look past the press releases and turn to the technical addendums of the resolution, you will find a definition that threatens to undo 70 years of Israeli sovereignty in the south. For the first time in history, an international resolution has created a legal mechanism that treats sovereign Israeli territory — specifically the Western Negev — as a conditional jurisdiction subject to international oversight.
The devil is in the definitions.
The resolution establishes an “International Stabilization Force” (ISF) to police the demilitarization of Gaza. Crucially, the text defines the ISF’s area of operation not just as the Gaza Strip, but as the Strip and “all adjacent logistical corridors, staging grounds, and dual-use infrastructure designated as essential for the stabilization of the primary zone.”
This language is a catastrophe of ambiguity. It does not distinguish between a temporary dirt road paved by the UN and a major Israeli artery like Route 232. It does not distinguish between a UN field hospital and the Soroka Medical Center, should Soroka treat ISF personnel.
By accepting this text without a specific reservation, Israel has allowed the UN to designate parts of the Eshkol, Sdot Negev, and Sha’ar HaNegev regional councils as “adjunct stabilization infrastructure.”
The immediate danger is not that UN peacekeepers will start issuing traffic tickets in Sderot. The danger is a bureaucratic phenomenon known as “jurisdictional creep,” particularly regarding American law. In Washington, geography dictates funding. Under the US Foreign Assistance Act, American aid is subject to rigorous vetting based on where it is spent. Historically, the Green Line was the hard border for these restrictions; funds spent in Tel Aviv were safe, while funds spent in Judea and Samaria were scrutinized.
Resolution 2803 erases that line. Consider the Ashkelon Desalination Plant. Under the humanitarian clauses of the new resolution, Israel is required to pump millions of cubic meters of water into the Gaza “Safe Zones.” Under the definition in the new annex, this makes the Ashkelon plant “dual-use infrastructure essential for stabilization.” Legal analysts in Washington are already warning that this designation could trigger a “neutrality review.” If Israel applies for US guarantees to expand the plant, the State Department could now legally block that funding, arguing that the expansion prejudices the operational balance of the international mission.
Resolution 2803 is effectively the “Area C-ization” of the Negev. It creates a grey zone of sovereignty where the map says Israel, but the regulatory burden implies an international zone. Imagine a scenario six months from now where the IDF needs to pave a new patrol road near Kibbutz Be’eri. European donors to the “Board of Peace” could protest, claiming that the road interferes with a projected “humanitarian corridor” outlined in the UN plan. Because Israel agreed to the resolution’s broad definitions, those donors would have a legal leg to stand on. The construction stops, the lawyers are summoned, and the Negev waits.
The government has a narrow window to fix this before the “Board of Peace” officially convenes in January 2026. Israel must immediately issue a State Interpretative Declaration, a diplomatic tool used to clarify how a state interprets a vague treaty. The Prime Minister must declare that the term “adjacent logistical corridors” refers exclusively to temporal transit rights for specific convoys and confers no territorial jurisdiction whatsoever. Furthermore, Israel must insist that all infrastructure within the 1949 Armistice Lines remains solely under Israeli domestic law and is eligible for unconditional US bilateral cooperation, regardless of its utility to the Gaza reconstruction effort.
The residents of the south have spent the last two years rebuilding their homes from the ashes of October 7. They deserve full, unadulterated sovereignty. They cannot be asked to live in a “stabilization zone” where their water, roads, and security are subject to a UN veto.
Amine Ayoub, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, is a policy analyst and writer based in Morocco. Follow him on X: @amineayoubx