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Sicily’s Jews have their first rabbi in 500 years. Italy’s Jewish establishment won’t accept them.
CATANIA, Italy (JTA) — Rabbi Gilberto Ventura believes his synagogue has the most beautiful view in the world. Located in the tower of a century-old castle on the slopes of Mt. Etna in the eastern Sicilian city of Catania, the synagogue is wedged between a snow-capped volcano and the sun-kissed Mediterranean sea.
The 49-year-old Brazil-born rabbi also thinks his congregation is one of the most unique in the world. It’s made up mainly of Bnei Anusim — descendants of Jews forced to hide their religious practice and convert to Catholicism after the Spanish Inquisition of 1492. Before that infamous decree, Sicily was home to tens of thousands of Jews.
The synagogue, which was first inaugurated last fall, is the result of decades of grassroots efforts by those descendants in Catania to find each other and forge a sense of community that had been lacking for centuries.
Hiring a full-time rabbi was the last piece of the puzzle, and Ventura, who has a long history of working with communities of Bnei Anusim in Brazil, was a natural candidate. He arrived in Catania in January.
“I really believe that the future Judaism in the world, especially in some places like Italy and, of course, Brazil, is connected to the Bnei Anusim, and the need to embrace the Bnei Anusim,” Ventura said.
But in an ongoing point of frustration, the formal organization representing Italian Jewry, the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI), does not recognize them as Jews.
“In the case of Catania, this strange Jewish community hasn’t passed all the steps the law requires,” said Giulio Di Segni, the vice president of UCEI.
He was referring to the fact that the community did not seek UCEI’s permission before establishing themselves under the name “Jewish community of Catania.” Per Italian law, UCEI has a monopoly on acknowledging and establishing Jewish communal life in Italy — including authority over who can use the term “Jewish community of” in formal ways.
“UCEI can’t accept this because it is too easy,” he added. “We are not against their synagogue or their way of prayer, but they cannot use the name ‘Jewish community of Catania.’”
The rooftop of the Castello Leucatia, where the community meets, has a large menorah and a view of the Mediterranean. (David I. Klein)
Catania’s Jewish community members told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency a variety of stories about their Jewish backgrounds. Some came from families that always outwardly identified as Jewish. Others identified the source of family traditions practiced by parents and grandparents who — as descendants of Jews who faced persecution for practicing Judaism — still felt the need to hide aspects of their Jewishness from the public eye.
In the midst of questions about their ancestry, the majority of the Jewish community members have undergone Orthodox conversions. But that hasn’t led to their acceptance.
Benito Triolo, president of the Catania Jewish community, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he first came to Judaism at the age of 40, thanks to the insight of a Jewish friend in Palermo, Sicily’s capital and most populous city. Working together, they established a Charter of Sicilian Jewry, which aimed to identify and highlight the Jewish heritage of neighborhoods across the island.
While working on that project, Triolo came closer to his own Jewish heritage, and after years of study, he completed an Orthodox conversion through a rabbi in Miami 25 years ago.
Another community member, who was born Alessandro Scuderi but today goes by the name of Yoram Nathan, first felt drawn to Judaism as a child watching news of the Six-Day War in 1967. At first, he was laughed at by other members of his family — except his grandmother, who happened to have a tradition of lighting eight candles in early winter and baking flat unleavened bread around Easter time.
Decades of study later, Scuderi also completed a formal conversion to Judaism before an Orthodox rabbinic court, or beit din.
Others had more straightforward backgrounds.
“I was born in a Jewish family,” said David Scibilia, the community’s secretary. “Frankly speaking, we were not hiding or deep in the shadows in this part of the country.”
Scibilia said that his father explained to him that he was a Jew as early as the age of four. Within their own home, they observed holidays and kept Shabbat — no easy task since Italian schools at the time of his childhood in the 1970s had class on Saturdays. He did not eat meat until he was an adult and was able to acquire kosher meat.
He said that his family had maintained their Jewish identity since the days of the Inquisition and married amongst a small group of other similar families.
“I was a Jew, but not part of any community,” Scibilia said. “Just my family was my community.”
An aerial view of the city of Catania shows the Mt. Etna volcano in the background, Jan. 28, 28, 2022. (Fabrizio Villa/Getty Images)
Scibilia explained that once he had a child of his own, he realized he did not want her to have the same lonely Jewish experience. But when he reached out to UCEI, he said he found the proverbial door to organized Jewish life shut. Earning membership in Jewish community organizations across Western Europe involves a strict vetting process, and many groups require applicants to prove their mothers’ Jewishness according to varying standards.
Scibilia’s experience was echoed by Jews outside of the community in Catania and across Italy’s south who talked to JTA — a feeling of neglect or rejection by UCEI for those who fall outside of the norms of Italian Judaism.
UCEI currently recognizes 19 Jewish communities across northern Italy and just one in the south, in Naples, which has jurisdiction over the rest of the southern half of the peninsula and the island of Sicily. The organization recognizes around 28,000 Jews in total across the country.
Scibilia noted that despite his Jewish upbringing, he has multiple certificates of conversion from Orthodox rabbis. The first came from a beit din of American rabbis from who traveled to Syracuse, Sicily, to assess Scibilia and others like him in Sicily. His second comes from the conversion court of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, which is known for its exacting Orthodox standards.
Both were rejected by Italy’s own Orthodox rabbinate, and he was forced to stand before another rabbinic court in Italy.
“I have at this moment — don’t start to laugh — three documents that prove that I am a Jew, two Ketubah [marriage contracts] for my wedding, and so on, again and again and again,” Scibilia said.
Others’ experiences in the region have been even more fraught, he said.
“The problem in Italy, that if you try to study with any rabbi here, you can study for 20 years, maybe you can die even before you reach the end of the tunnel,” he said. “From my point of view, they are playing with the spirituality of these people.”
In a statement last year, UCEI called the the Catanians “a phantom ‘Jewish community’” and accused them of “misleading the local institutions and deluding believers and sympathizers into adhering to traditional religious rites, never actually recognized or authorized by the Italian rabbinical authority.”
“Between UCEI and the Italian republic is an agreement signed in ‘87,” Di Segni said. “This law means everything about Jewish communities in Italy is through the Union Jewish community in Italy (UCEI).”
Noemi Di Segni, shown in Rome in 2017, is president of the Union of Jewish Communities in Italy. (Stefano Montesi/Corbis via Getty Images)
Triolo said he isn’t too concerned about UCEI’s recognition.
“Ours is a process of refounding old communities that existed as early as 200 and up to 1492,” Triolo said. “Our recognition is already in our history. At that time the UCEI did not exist. We were there and we simply returned!”
No one knows when Jews first arrived in Sicily, but the Talmud tells a story that claims Rabbi Akiva, a well-known early rabbinic sage, visited the island in the early second century and told of a small Jewish community in Syracuse. Some historians believe the Roman writer Caecilius Calactinus — who was born in a town near Messina in the first century B.C.E — to have been of Jewish origin.
All agree that over the course of history, Sicily’s Jews watched as the island was traded between Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs, Normans and half a dozen other empires. The narrative has also long been that Jewish life there ended five centuries ago, under Spanish rule.
The Spanish empire’s Jews suffered the same fate as Jews from the Iberian peninsula, who would become known to the world as Sephardim when they were expelled in 1492.
The descendents of Spain — and Sicily — spread throughout the world, establishing communities in North Africa, throughout the Ottoman empire, in the Netherlands and ultimately the British Isles and North America, as it was believed that Judaism faded away in their homelands.
Catania’s Jews disagree, arguing that many Jews practiced their religion over the centuries, in secret.
Triolo and others in the community formally inaugurated their synagogue in October. It was furnished with Torah scrolls donated by the Ohev Sholom synagogue in Washington, D.C.
The synagogue is situated in the tower of the Castello Luecatia, an early 20th-century structure built by a merchant believed to be of Jewish origin. The building was granted to the community by the city’s municipality.
“So they had the people, they had a synagogue, but they needed somebody to teach,” Ventura said.
The community meets in the Castello Luecatia, an early 20th-century structure built by a merchant believed to be of Jewish origin. (David I. Klein)
Ventura, who is Orthodox, may be the island’s first permanent working rabbi in over 500 years, but it’s not his first time working with Bnei Anusim.
Back in his native Brazil, Ventura was the leader of the Synagogue Without Borders, an organization through which he served 15 communities in Brazil’s north that were made up of descendants of Jews who came with the first Portuguese colonists to South America and who ultimately had to hide their identity as the Inquisition spread to the New World.
His work there put him in conflict with Brazil’s Jewish establishment, too. But Ventura is unfazed.
In Brazil, he founded synagogues and summer camps and built mikvahs and yeshivas across the country’s north. Since 2015, he has facilitated the conversion of hundreds of Bnei Anusim, bringing them back into the fold of mainstream Orthodox Judaism.
“I am a teacher since I was 21 years old,” he said. “Now I am 49, along with my wife. It’s one of the things we love to do, and know how to do. To teach Jewish philosophy, to teach Torah, to teach Tanakh, to teach the story of the Jews in Brazil, and now we are starting to teach the story of the Jews in Italy, the story of the Inquisition etcetera.”
In Castello Leucatia, he leads Shabbat services with the energy of a gospel preacher, pausing between prayers to explain a verse, teach a new tune, welcome latecomers, or simply to allow the congregation to talk.
Catania community members are shown at a recent gathering. (David I. Klein)
“This is what’s most important,” he remarked during one such lull on a recent Friday night. “That they get to talk and be a community.”
Ventura had organized a Shabbat event for other Jews across Italy — from Naples to Turin — who shared his belief that the future of Judaism was in communities like the one in Catania.
“Our point of view of Judaism is that we have to be a part of society, we don’t have to insulate ourselves, we believe that Judaism has a lot to contribute to society,” Ventura said. “In Brazil, we have a lot of connections with people from the periphery, in the favela and other communities, immigrants, Indians, etcetera. So that is something we want to establish here, to teach the people a Judaism that brings good things to the wider society.”
Ventura isn’t the only one working with such communities in southern Italy. Across the Strait of Messina, Jewish life has also been on the rise in Calabria — the toe of Italy’s boot — thanks to an American-born rabbi named Barbara Aiello.
Aiello, though raised in Pittsburgh, is of Calabrian descent. She returned to the land of her ancestors in the early 2000s and began working with the Bnei Anusim there, ultimately establishing a synagogue called Ner Tamid del Sud, meaning “eternal light of the south.”
“Until now, nobody took care of Judaism in the south of Italy,” Scibilia said while looking out at the Mediterranean from the terrace of Castello Leucatia.
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The post Sicily’s Jews have their first rabbi in 500 years. Italy’s Jewish establishment won’t accept them. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Former Edmonton journalist admits to vandalizing monuments of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators
(JTA) —
EDMONTON, Canada – Duncan Kinney, a former journalist with the left-wing website Progress Report, pleaded guilty to criminal mischief on Monday, four years after he was arrested for vandalizing monuments to Ukrainian Nazi collaborators in Edmonton, Alberta.
Monday’s guilty plea was an anticlimactic not-quite-end to a case that appeared to be run-of-the-mill vandalism but was so culturally charged that it drew the attention of everyone from the Premier of Alberta to Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Toronto.
In 2021, Kinney broke the news story that someone had spray-painted “Actual Nazi” on a bust erected to honor WWII military commander and Nazi collaborator Roman Shukhevych and then painted “Nazi Monument” and “14th Waffen SS” on a memorial to the SS Galizien, a Ukrainian military unit that was part of the Nazi Party’s military wing.
According to court documents, Kinney was caught on a security camera spray-painting the Shukhevych monument shortly after midnight on Aug. 10, 2021, and caught again eight hours later photographing his handiwork. He then sent an email to the staff of the Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex, where the monument was located, explaining that Progress Report had received photos of the defaced monument. The brief email concluded with “Do you have any statement or information on this matter? Was Roman Shukhevych a Nazi or Nazi collaborator? Our deadline is 3:15 pm. Thank you.”
Kinney initially pleaded not guilty to one count each of criminal mischief and mischief relating to a war memorial. He suggested he’d been targeted because he was critical of the Edmonton Police Service and alleged that they were trying to silence him.
He is due to be sentenced Jan. 25, 2027, at which time the crown prosecutor is expected to drop the more serious charge of defacing a war memorial, which carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.
Neither Kinney nor his defense attorney, Tom Engel, would comment after the court appearance. However, the board of Progress Report issued a statement decrying its former employee’s actions, calling committing a crime and reporting that somebody else did it “a cardinal breach of journalistic ethics and not acceptable behavior within any media organization. Mr. Kinney has always maintained his innocence in this matter and we trusted him; today’s news was an unpleasant surprise for us.”
Ultimately, the case exposed deep divisions in the Ukrainian diaspora about the role that Ukraine played in the Holocaust.
Shukhevych was a leader in both the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed force, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). He was also an officer in a Third Reich auxiliary battalion. During World War II, he commanded troops that murdered Jews, Polish civilians, other national minorities, communists and his countrymen from Ukraine. And he helped marshal the fight for Ukrainian independence from the Soviets.
The monument to the SS Galizien is located at St. Michael’s Cemetery, less than two miles from the complex housing the Shukhevych bust. Among the unit’s members was Yaroslav Hunka, who, at age 98, received two standing ovations for his service in WWII and fighting for Ukrainian independence when he appeared in the House of Commons alongside visiting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in September 2023.
Nobody in Parliament, it seemed, was aware of Hunka’s Nazi past. When the news became public, the incident became a national embarrassment. At least temporarily, the country was forced to examine how it dealt with WWII war criminals.
In Edmonton, however, the blunder appeared to have no impact on Kinney’s case. For his alleged vandalism to the SS Galizien monument, he had been charged not with simple mischief, but with vandalizing a war monument.
“We do not consider a statue honoring a Nazi to be a war monument,” says Jaime Kirzner-Roberts, senior director of policy and advocacy at the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center in Toronto. “When we talk about veterans’ monuments, we are talking about Canada’s veterans. We are not talking about Nazi veterans.”
Kirzner-Roberts’ organization, B’nai Brith Canada and the Jewish Federation of Edmonton, as well as local politicians and academics, have been asking for years for the monuments to be removed.
“I think that in the case of the Shukhevych monument, you shouldn’t put up monuments to people responsible for mass murder,” says John-Paul Himka, a University of Alberta professor emeritus of history, whose 2021 book “Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust” examines the role that the OUN and UPA had in destroying Ukraine’s Jewish population during WWII.
“As for the Waffen-SS memorial, Austria has also been trying to get rid of their Waffen-SS memorials and it’s an issue around the world, really, how much you want to put up memorials to SS men or to people who collaborated with the Nazi state.”
Less than six months after the Hunka debacle in Parliament, the monument to the SS Galizien at the St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Cemetery in Oakville, Ontario, was permanently removed. Himka doesn’t see anything like that happening in Edmonton, a city with the largest population of people with Ukrainian descent in a country with one of the largest populations of people with Ukrainian descent outside of Ukraine.
“The diaspora community doesn’t want to hear about this,” he says. “They don’t want to confront the history, and nobody is telling them otherwise really.”
The courtroom, though, did host one such confrontation. At the conclusion of Kinney’s appearance, two women who appeared to be in their 40s and who had spent the half-hour proceedings knitting, engaged in a conversation with two men who appeared to be at least twice their age and were sitting across the aisle.
The discussion started innocently enough, with inquiries as to what brought each of them to the courtroom. When the women said that Shukhevych was a Nazi who had killed thousands of innocent people, the temperature heated up.
When the women insisted, the men all but rolled their eyes. “That’s Russian propaganda,” they scoffed, then got up and marched together out of the courtroom.
The post Former Edmonton journalist admits to vandalizing monuments of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators appeared first on The Forward.
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Mike Rogers says his opponent is ‘anti-Jew.’ Do Michigan’s Jews believe him?
(JTA) —
WHITE LAKE, Mich. – Former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers did not have to go very far back in time to find a new example of how, in his view, his opponent is a danger to the Jewish community. Twelve hours would do.
Rogers recalled an interview that had aired the previous night on ABC. “He basically said that Israel now is just not an ally — matter of fact may be the enemy — of the United States of America,” the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Tuesday morning.
The “he” in question was, of course, Abdul El-Sayed, the former county health director and polarizing Democratic nominee for the state’s open Senate seat. The night before, El-Sayed had told ABC that Israel was “not actually our friend.” He also recently told MS NOW that “the government of Israel has done nothing but use us.”
Rogers, by contrast, told JTA that Israel is “the best ally we have in the Middle East. They have Western values baked into their political system.” He proudly noted that far-right commentator Tucker Carlson has attacked him for his pro-Israel views.
Remarks like the ones El-Sayed recently made, Rogers continued, clarify his view of his opponent: “There’s so much evidence. It’s pretty hard to say that this guy is anything but anti-Jew.”
For Rogers and the Republican Party writ large, El-Sayed’s hardline criticism of Israel has thrown them an unexpected gift in a tough race that could help determine who controls the Senate after the November midterms.
That opportunity runs through Michigan’s Jewish community. At a recent rally in the state, Vice President JD Vance echoed that criticism, accusing El-Sayed of being “obsessed” with Israel.
“He’s 10 times more interested in what’s happening in Palestine than in Port Huron,” Vance, whose own views on Israel have concerned many conservative Jews, told the crowd. “He’s way more interested in what’s happening in Gaza than he is in what’s happening in Grand Rapids.”
Another recent Trump administration event, held at a Michigan synagogue, mostly discussed antisemitism. Neither Senate candidate’s name was mentioned from the stage. But Jews who attended the event told JTA they were scared of the prospect of a Senator El-Sayed. “I pray he does not get in,” one attendee, Sharon Matlen, said.
Rogers, a former congressman who lost the 2024 Senate race to Elissa Slotkin, a Jewish Democrat, by fewer than 20,000 votes, hopes to convince enough of the state’s estimated 100,000 Jewish adults and other traditionally Democratic blocs to vote for him in the election in two weeks’ time. He’s confident of his chances.
“I think the alternative is so bad, and they looked at us and said, ‘He’s not that bad,’” the candidate said. “And trust me, I think that’s a good place for us to be.”
Rogers positions himself as a common-sense Republican, one whose chief concerns are improving child literacy, rebuilding manufacturing jobs and lowering utility rates. Drawing on his military background, he insists he doesn’t have a problem with the fact that El-Sayed is Muslim: “I wore the uniform of the United States so you can pray any way you want.”
Local rabbi Asher Lopatin, who briefly went on leave from his role directing Jewish communal relations in Ann Arbor to stump for Rogers, has called him “a caring, sensitive man.”
Rogers is also trying to make inroads with Black communities, as well as other ethnic and faith-based groups. At a Tim Hortons in this tony Detroit suburb, an Iraqi Christian couple came out from behind the counter to take selfies and profess their support.
But among his potential new voters, it’s the Jewish community Rogers has made the most overt appeals to. His outreach has included meeting with various Jewish clergy and community leaders and hosting a meet-and-greet Sunday night in a heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, catered by a kosher BBQ joint. And he and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz will be appearing together in Detroit next week for an event spearheaded by the Republican Jewish Coalition titled, “Who Will Keep Us Safe?”
Hundreds of Jews, including several prominent community leaders and lifelong Democrats, have already signed a pledge to vote for Rogers. El-Sayed’s association with left-wing streamer Hasan Piker and linking of the spring attack on Temple Israel to Israel’s war in Lebanon have troubled some Jewish voters.
(L-r) Michigan Jewish Democratic activist Alicia Chandler, Illinois congressional candidate Daniel Biss and former Michigan Rep. Andy Levin make a progressive Jewish case for Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to a small audience of conflicted Jews in Detroit, Michigan, Oct. 19, 2026. (Andrew Lapin/JTA)
But others, even those deeply worried about El-Sayed and his movement, still can’t bring themselves to support the current Republican platform. A new progressive canvassing campaign is targeting Jews in the Detroit suburbs to persuade them not to vote for the GOP candidate.
“We’ve been doing a lot of listening to people’s concerns and anxieties,” said Amanda Berger, a progressive Jewish activist from California who is leading Seed the Vote’s Jewish canvassing efforts for El-Sayed in Michigan.
But the volunteers’ goals, Berger told JTA, are then “to pivot to the question of, what will it mean to you, or what will it mean to the Jewish community, or what will it mean to your neighbors, if Mike Rogers is elected and Trump is unchecked for another two years.”
Elaine Driker, a prominent Detroit Jewish community leader, was no fan of El-Sayed. Yet after seeing so many of her peers sign the pro-Rogers letter, Driker signed a Jewish letter pledging to vote for El-Sayed.
She then went a step further, hosting Daniel Biss, a progressive Jewish congressional candidate from Illinois, and 50 Jews at her house Monday night for a dialogue about El-Sayed. One in attendance, Susan Ruttenberg, admitted that though she had already cast her vote for the Democrat, “I’m uncomfortable with him.”
Biss holds Israeli citizenship and told the group he believes “that the Jewish people have a legitimate claim to the land where the state of Israel has been established.” He conceded, “Some of the ways that Abdul has spoken about antisemitism have landed imperfectly with some people.”
Yet Biss insisted, “I think he’s shown a willingness to learn and grow.” He also warned the crowd against what he called “the political narrowness of the organized Jewish community.”
It was one of several such small-room Jewish conversations about the race that have taken place in recent weeks. Others have featured New York congressional candidate Brad Lander and Vermont U.S. Rep. Becca Balint. Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who dropped out of the Senate primary that El-Sayed eventually won, will speak at another.
The events are intended “to breathe some air into the possibility that Abdul is not scary, that he is not antisemitic,” said Stacie Chaiken, an organizer with Michigan Jews for Democracy, which is also putting on the meet-and-greets. The coalition’s open letter of Jews pledging to vote for El-Sayed has topped 950 signatures to date.
To win over more Jews, Rogers will make his case by acknowledging what other Jews have told him is a deep fear for where the country is headed.
“They’re afraid for what kind of America their children will live in,” Rogers told JTA of the Jews he’s spoken to on the campaign trail. El-Sayed is building a “movement,” the Republican said, arguing that such a movement bodes poorly for Jews: “You have to remember, if elected to the Senate, this is just the beginning for them.”
Democrat US Senate candidate for Michigan Abdul El-Sayed speaks during a midterm campaign rally in Flint, Michigan on October 18, 2026. El-Sayed is competing against Republican candidate Mike Rodgers for Michigan’s US Senate seat in the upcoming midterm elections. (Jeff Kowalsky / AFP via Getty Images)
Rogers repeatedly brought up his opponent’s “ideology” and “extremism.” He sought to link El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood, echoing a growing GOP line of attack. Republicans have cited resurfaced tweets by El-Sayed’s half-sister describing their mother’s activism in the movement in the early 1970s.
El-Sayed has disavowed the group and accused questioners of invoking Islamophobic tropes.
Rogers also said he doubted the sincerity of El-Sayed’s August apology to the Jewish community for his “hurt people hurt people” remarks regarding the March attack on Temple Israel — a similar sentiment other Michigan Jews have shared with JTA.
“That’s not an apology,” he said. “That says, ‘I’m sorry I said it then. Maybe I should have said it later.’ I don’t buy that.”
The Rogers campaign is additionally arguing that El-Sayed’s rhetoric has activated a deeper antisemitic contingent on the left. A Rogers campaign staffer, who is Jewish, posted to X Tuesday morning that El-Sayed is “a raging antisemite who is responsible for the hate and vitriol Michigan Jews face daily,” with a link to his ABC interview. That staffer, Abby Ronson, told JTA that she received death threats because of the tweet after progressive commentator Mehdi Hasan went after her.
El-Sayed has strongly rejected any allegation that he is antisemitic, saying he loves Judaism and that “AIPAC and Israel are not the same as Judaism and the Jewish people.” Some of the state’s top Jewish Democrats, including Slotkin and state Attorney General Dana Nessel, have endorsed him; others, including congressional candidate Jeremy Moss, have not.
But Rogers also hopes to tell more of Michigan’s Jews who he is — beyond simply not being El-Sayed. There’s someone else, he said, who he’s not: the deeply unpopular Republican president.
“I’m not Trump. And I don’t plan to be Trump when I get to Washington,” Rogers said. He listed issues he has broken with Trump on, including the joint U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, which Rogers formerly supported but now wants wrapped up: “I argue we met our objectives. Don’t hang out there very long.”
If such a view puts him at odds with Israeli leadership, he said, they will politely hash it out. “Every once in a while, we’re going to disagree with our allies. I don’t see this as a problem.”
Still, when it comes to issues of concern to Jewish voters, Rogers said he’s more aligned with Trump than not. He “absolutely” approves of the president’s campaign against campus antisemitism, which has drawn criticism and legal action for pulling billions of dollars in funding from various universities in order to pressure them to sign settlements.
If the government wanted to do the same to the University of Michigan, the state’s top research school that has been embroiled in a stream of antisemitism controversies of its own, Rogers — who donned Michigan gear for a TV ad running in the state — would support it.
“I wish there were a better way, but nothing else is working,” he told JTA. “Hell, their professors are talking in ways that would be shocking about an ally to the United States, and they’re buying into this ‘oppressor versus oppressed.’ It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. The whole thing is anti-American. We’re going to get it fixed.”
Rogers dismissed as “a made-up story” reports that his allies had asked the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC not to advertise publicly on his behalf, reportedly because they fearedfearing its involvement could hurt his campaign.
“What I’ve always said is, if anybody wants to help defeat the most extreme candidate from his Democratic Socialists of America ties to his very, I think, hateful, angry, riddled contempt for Israel and Jews, welcome,” Rogers said. “I’ll take anybody that wants to help.” El-Sayed is not a DSA member, but he has spoken at the organization’s events and received campaign support from its members.
Recently, an AIPAC-linked super PAC, the United Democracy Project, spent about $95,000 against El-Sayed, according to federal elections filings. That expenditure took the form of mailers targeting the Jewish community.
Rogers insists his fight against El-Sayed is bigger than the candidates. Voters, he said, are concerned with what the Democratic Party’s treatment of Jews says about the coalition’s direction in general.
“I can’t tell you how many people tell me that they’re so disappointed in their party,” he said. “And if you can bring yourself to diminish one set of people or one ethnic group of people in Michigan, what stops you there? I argue, nothing.”
Yet many of the Michigan Jews trying to convince their neighbors to vote for El-Sayed are making the same argument — in a different order — about Republicans. The GOP’s demonizing of certain immigrant groups and LGBTQ people, progressive Jews argue, could lead back to antisemitism.
“A society that abandons pluralism in an effort to attack someone other than the Jews is surely going to be coming for the Jews pretty soon,” Biss told the assembled crowd on Monday.
Rogers rejected the premise that Republicans are doing the same thing. “I don’t equate them at all,” he said. “It may be a legitimate concern. But if you have somebody that wants to eliminate, you know, ‘from the river to the sea,’ last I checked, that’s just about every Jew that lives in Israel. There’s no more clear, brighter line than that.”
On his way out the door to speak at the Detroit Economic Club, Rogers was asked if he had any last message for American Jews.
“Keep the faith,” he said, before driving away.
The post Mike Rogers says his opponent is ‘anti-Jew.’ Do Michigan’s Jews believe him? appeared first on The Forward.
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Germany reprimands Iran over plot to kill Jewish leader and Israel advocate
(JTA) — Germany’s foreign ministry summoned Iran’s ambassador after a German court convicted two men of spying for Tehran and plotting attacks on a leader of the country’s Jewish community and a prominent non-Jewish supporter of Israel.
A slap on the wrist is not enough, said Volker Beck, president of the interfaith German-Israeli Society, who had been one of the spies’ targets.
Iranian Ambassador Majid Nili Ahmadabadi and most of the embassy’s personnel should be personae non grata in Germany, Beck said. He added he would be satisfied if the embassy was emptied except for a lone guard “to look after the building and this is it.”
Hamburg’s Higher Regional Court last week sentenced 54-year-old defendant S. to eight-and-a-half years in prison and 43-year-old defendant M. to four and a half years for plotting assassinations and an arson attack. The convicts’ full names have not been publicized.
The court found that the two men, living in Denmark, had in early 2025 carried out orders from Iranian intelligence oepratives to spy on Josef Schuster, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, and Beck, a Green Party politician and longtime Israel advocate, with the aim of planning an assassination.
In a statement issued Oct. 15, the court said that defendant S. was allegedly tasked “with conducting surveillance on Jewish or Israeli targets — including both locations and individuals — within Germany and preparing to carry out murders and arson attacks against them.”
S. was also convicted of conducting surveillance on a Jewish grocery store in Berlin. “To execute these orders, the defendant S. reportedly enlisted the assistance of the defendant M,” the court said.
The convicted men have until Oct. 22 to appeal the verdict. Further details about the case and the court’s reasoning will be released with the final report, in about three months, a spokesperson for the court told JTA in an email.
In a statement sent to JTA, Schuster praised the verdict but called the case “the tip of the iceberg.”
“With the now proven commissioning of these two spies, the regime in Tehran has once again shown its true face. The masterminds are in Iran, and the danger they pose to our open society remains great as long as the mullahs’ regime exists,” he said.
At the trial, Germany’s federal security agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, testified that it got wind of the plot in 2024, Beck told JTA. “Last year I had six weeks of the highest level of personal protection,” said Beck, who is not Jewish. He couldn’t take out the trash or walk his dog without police protection.
After German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul’s summoned Iran’s ambassador, Iran called in Germany’s ambassador to the country, Axel Wilhelm Dittmann, for a meeting in Tehran to complain about accusations it considers “baseless.”
In a post Oct. 19 on X, the German Foreign Ministry said Germany “will not allow Iran to threaten our free society. We will not tolerate attacks on Jewish life and those who defend it—anywhere, least of all in Germany. The malicious attempted attacks against” Schuster and Beck “will have legal consequences.”
The post Germany reprimands Iran over plot to kill Jewish leader and Israel advocate appeared first on The Forward.
