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Simchat Torah in Hostages Square lays bare divide over just how much to celebrate yet
(JTA) — Rabba Anat Sharbat, the unofficial “rabbi of Hostages Square,” wept as she recited the Shehechiyanu blessing after lighting the candles to mark the beginning of Simchat Torah holiday on Monday evening, hours after all 20 living hostages returned to Israel.
Two years before, the same holiday had been marked by silence and fear after the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel ended celebrations across the country.
Before the plaza even became known as Hostages Square, Sharbat had established what became a ritual — Kabbalat Shabbat services and Havdalah every week, in her words, “out of a deep belief that there needed to be a space here for prayer,” not only for protest.
Faith, she said, had played a role in the hostages’ return.
“The prayers in the square were an integral part of the effort to return them,” Sharbat said. “We heard from hostages who came back that they heard and felt the prayers, and that it gave them strength.”
Last Simchat Torah, she faced uncertainty about whether to hold prayers at all. There was barely a minyan — the quorum of 10 needed for Jewish prayer — and dancing felt impossible. Still, she insisted on continuing “out of a deep belief in the need to maintain hope, together with the families, that their loved ones will return home.” That conviction was validated when Dvora Leshem, the nonagenarian grandmother of the hostage Romi Gonen, approached the small group that night and said she was glad the prayers were taking place. Romi Gonen would be released about three months later.
On this year’s Hebrew anniversary, a very different scene unfolded in the square. As evening fell, a few dozen men and women gathered for prayers followed by hakafot, the traditional Simchat Torah dances encircling the Torah scrolls. The crowd of dancers quickly swelled to more than 200, while onlookers filmed and applauded from the sidelines. Among them was a woman in a Bring Them Home T-shirt who recalled that less than two weeks before Oct. 7, the sight of public, gender-separated prayer during Yom Kippur services had filled her with “extreme anguish.”
“But today, let them dance,” she said. “We are all dancing, finally.”
But the joy was marred by the knowledge that not all the deceased hostages had returned. For some, that reality was impossible to reconcile with the scenes of jubilation. One man, wearing a T-shirt that read in Hebrew, English, and Arabic “We are all created equal,” shouted at the dancers while filming on his phone. “These religious zealots can’t just stand respectfully, they have to dance like animals,” he said.
By Wednesday morning, eight bodies had been brought to Israel for burial. Seven were identified as hostages, while the eighth did not match any of the 28 confirmed dead. Two more, both Israelis, were returned on Wednesday.
The tension carried into Tuesday night, when tens of thousands filled Hostages Square again for a second round of Torah dancing traditionally held after the holiday. The seven dances alternated between grief and gratitude, each dedicated to a different group, including the fallen hostages still in Gaza, those who had returned, reservists, and their families.
Tel Aviv Deputy Mayor Chaim Goren said the event, organized annually by the municipality with Ma’ale Eliyahu Yeshiva and other national-religious groups, was originally meant to take place at a nearby plaza. “It felt detached to hold it there,” he said. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum agreed to move it to the square, though the decision wasn’t final until the last minute.
“There was back-and-forth until the holiday started about whether and how to do it,” Goren said. “With all the joy, there’s still a kvetch in the heart” — using the Yiddish word for ache — “but there’s also a deep need to give thanks to God for what we’ve witnessed.”
For Tel Aviv resident Sapir Barak, the night offered a release she hadn’t allowed herself since Oct. 7, 2023.
“When they announced the release yesterday, I basically had a nervous breakdown,” she said. “I was crying so much. There are so many emotions. It’s like a dream come true, but you don’t know what to do with it.”
Nearby, Henri Rosenberg cut an unusual figure in Hasidic garb with a fur shtreimel and a “Bring Them Home” dog tag around his neck, standing beside his grandson who wore a red MAGA baseball cap. But despite appearances, Rosenberg said he no longer identified as haredi Orthodox, having grown disillusioned by what he called indifference within some haredi circles to the pain felt by other Israelis during the war. Health problems had led him to attend a nearby national-religious synagogue over the High Holidays, where, he recalled, “the cantor wept for the hostages and the soldiers.”
“They are our flesh and blood, and that’s why I’m here tonight,” he said.
From the stage, Genia Erlich Zohar, aunt of American-Israeli hostage Omer Neutra — whose body remains in Gaza and who would have turned 24 on Tuesday — called on the crowd to respect the duality of the moment.
“We hold both joy for those who came home and hope and pain for those who haven’t,” she said. “We are one people, one heart.”
Miri Polachek, a friend of the Neutra family who has volunteered with relatives of the hostages, said she came to the event to support the Neutras and the other families. Recalling her own son’s playdates with Omer when they were children, she said, “It’s a never-ending reminder that it could have been any of our children.”
Among those on stage was Elkana Levy, a Golani Brigade officer who lost both legs in an explosion in Khan Younis. One of three brothers wounded in the Gaza war, he led a silent hakafa from his wheelchair and vowed that those “fighting day and night for the return of our brothers … would never break.”
At the edge of the square, a few dozen demonstrators held posters of those still in Gaza, chanting “Everyone, now!” — the familiar rallying cry for the hostages’ return.
Hagit Chen, holding “Gucci,” the small white dog that had belonged to her son, slain hostage and dual American-Israeli citizen Itay Chen, whose body has not yet been returned, called Monday’s release “a huge miracle,” even as she admitted her faith had been shaken.
“I was convinced Itay would be returning home yesterday with the others,” she said. Still, she added, the elation around her was not an affront. “I don’t look at joy that way. I embrace what’s happening here. We all need the strength it gives us.”
“But we cannot take our foot off the gas,” she said. “The deal is not a good one for the fallen hostages.” She pointed to what she described as the vague language of the Trump.-brokered agreement, which requires Hamas to make “all necessary efforts” to secure their release. “If we don’t see their return, it will be an open wound for all of us.”
Dani Miran, whose son Omri was among those freed on Monday, said Israel should halt the next stage of the deal until every hostage is accounted for.
“We should have resumed fighting at 1 p.m. yesterday, the moment we understood the 28 bodies weren’t coming home,” he said at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, where his son is receiving treatment. “[Hamas] will not understand anything else.”
Miran said he would remain in Tel Aviv, where he has lived since his son’s abduction, until the last hostage returns. He declined to say whether he would shave his long white beard, a vow he made to keep until Omri came home.
Activist and artist Hila Galilee, posed with Miran’s longtime partner, Galia Korel, while holding a mock yellow Torah scroll with images of the hostages. “The entire Torah is the hostages,” she said.
The question of what to do with the hostages’ symbols no longer has a single answer. Romi Gonen was filmed with friends tearing off the tape marking the number of days the hostages have been held, cheering as they did. Rachel Goldberg-Polin, who began the tape tradition for her son, slain hostage Hersh, said on Wednesday that she would continue to wear hers.
Hagit and her husband, Ruby Chen, criticized Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana for removing his hostage pin during President Trump’s visit to the Knesset. “It isn’t over,” Chen addressed Ohana in a video posted to social media. “Put the pin back on until the last hostage is back.”
After Trump announced that the living hostages would be returning home, Miran urged Tel Aviv mayor Ron Huldai to rename the site Returnees’ Square. But Hagit Chen said in an interview on Tuesday night that the name Hostages Square should remain until all are home.
In the square, posters of freed hostages have been taken down, some replaced by new banners, including one with Trump’s words, “Now is the time for peace.” Other features remain unchanged, including the mock tunnel evoking the underground passages where many hostages were held in Gaza and the digital clock counting the days and seconds since the attacks.
Miran, who had walked the one block from the hospital to the square, led the crowd in a psalm of thanksgiving. “Secular, religious — I hate these distinctions. All I see from up here is Jews,” he said from the stage. “Let’s stay like this. The nation of Israel lives.”
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‘There was a campaign’: UN torture official says colleagues tried to block her letter documenting Oct. 7 atrocities
An Australian lawyer tasked by the United Nations with monitoring and documenting allegations of torture and cruelty is accusing colleagues within the UN human rights system of trying to block the publication of a Jan. 2024 letter she wrote documenting allegations of abuses committed during the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel months earlier.
Alice Edwards, who since 2022 has served as United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, said she faced weeks of pressure from colleagues who argued that allegations included in the letter she drafted were false and urged her not to send it.
“There was a campaign to prevent that letter going out,” Edwards said in remarks delivered earlier this month at University College London and obtained by the Forward. “There was weeks of being bullied and deterred from writing it and telling me that everything in it was false.”
Edwards’ statements resurfaced a long-simmering conflict in the UN human rights system around its treatment of Israel, which is frequently singled out by UN resolutions and by rapporteurs as a perpetrator of human rights violations.
Meanwhile, other UN rapporteurs have declared doubts on evidence of sexual violence committed during the Oct. 7 attacks — prompting a surviving hostage and the head of an investigative commission that published a report last month compiling witness and survivor testimonies to confront them this week at a hearing in Geneva.
Edwards’ letter, sent in early 2024 to Palestinian authorities and copied to Hamas, detailed allegations of torture, sexual violence, including rapes and gang rapes, burning people alive, and other abuses committed during the Oct. 7 attacks.
According to Edwards, colleagues had given extensive feedback on drafts of the letter, with some items removed from the final version as a result. “All the comments of these individuals had been taken into account,” she said, adding that “the letter shrunk considerably.”
Even after those revisions, Edwards said, only one counterpart — the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, Morris Tidball-Binz — ultimately signed the communication before it was sent.
Other special rapporteurs and working groups who had expressed interest in signing it, she said, “had also been bullied by others not to sign on.” Edwards added: “There was this concerted effort for this letter not to put on record some allegations that had been received.”
Contacted by the Forward, Danny Danon, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN sent a written statement. “Dr. Alice Edwards’ testimony exposes an uncomfortable truth: when it comes to Israel, facts are too often sacrificed on the altar of politics,” said Danon. “The evidence is overwhelming and undeniable. For more than two years, Israel has documented and presented the horrific crimes committed against its citizens.”
UN special rapporteurs are independent human rights experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council to monitor, investigate and advise on thematic topics that include torture, violence against women, and education among others. While their recommendations are not binding, their advice informs UN action and aims to influence governments’ responses to alleged violations.
Israeli officials and advocacy groups had long argued that the United Nations devotes disproportionate attention to Israel’s alleged wrongdoing compared to other countries and holds Israel to a double standard. Since the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, they say, the UN and its rapporteurs have not adequately condemned Hamas’ atrocities and the treatment of Israeli hostages.
Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, has said that the Israeli government’s failure to cooperate with her mandate has undermined investigative efforts and “represents a profound injustice to all the victims.” She also has called into question reports from victims, witnesses and investigators who described rape as part of the Oct. 7 violence.
In a post on X in November 2025, Alsalem wrote: “No Palestinian applauded rape in Gaza. No independent investigation found that rape took place on the 7th of October 2023.”
She also wrote of allegations of Hamas perpetrated sexual violence against Israelis: “I firmly believe that never have we seen such a weaponization of accusations of sexual violence as well as disinformation to manufacture consent for the commission of a genocide – aided and abetted by the media and governments around the world.”
The tensions resurfaced publicly this week at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva when Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, founder and chair of the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children, presented findings from the commission’s recently published report, Silenced No More.
The report, which has been received by governments, international organizations, academic institutions, and policymakers around the world and boasts many endorsers, is the most comprehensive body of evidence yet of sexual violence on October 7. It catalogues witness testimonies, accounts from hostages about sexual abuse during their captivity, and analysis of over 10,000 photos and videos, including hours-long videos recorded by the perpetrators.
“For two years, we immersed ourselves in testimonies of unimaginable violence,” Elkayam-Levy said Wednesday during her presentation of the findings at the UN in Geneva. “We revealed 13 patterns of abuse — including rape, gang rape, sexual torture, burning, and the deliberate mutilation of victims’ faces and genitalia.”
She went on to single out the UN human rights representatives as unresponsive to the evidence. “Will the UN rapporteurs who doubted or denied these crimes acknowledge the truth?” she said, adding, “We call upon you to recognize our findings.”
A day earlier, Ilana Gritzewsky, a survivor of Hamas captivity who has spoken publicly about sexual violence she experienced, confronted Alsalem directly during a live testimony in an emotional appeal.
“Ms. Alsalem, you said there was no evidence of sexual violence on October 7,” she said. “I am the living proof of sexual violence by Hamas. When I and other Israeli women begged not to be raped, why were you silent?”
‘She was very brave’
Asked about Edwards’ allegations, the UN office that supports the special rapporteurs and other independent human rights experts provided a statement to the Forward: “While the experts frequently issue joint communications on issues that engage multiple mandates, participation in any particular communication remains at the full discretion of each expert, in line with their mandate.”
According to Dr. Shelly Aviv Yeini, the former head of the international law department at the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, Edwards and the United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Pramila Patten, were among a small number of UN officials who meaningfully engaged with hostage families after the terror attacks. Individuals within the Office of the Secretary-General reached out later in the war.
Aviv Yeini told the Forward that her group and the International Jewish Lawyers Organization provided Edwards with a report that informed Edwards’ later work. Edwards published a report determining that the families of hostages should also be recognized as direct victims of torture and hosted an event in Geneva alongside the forum to present and discuss those findings.
“I think she was very brave, acknowledging the families and defending us in a time when it wasn’t so easy,” said Yeini.
Adam Wagner, who spoke at the event and represented hostages with British ties taken by Hamas, told Edwards that she was “the only UN official” whom hostage families felt “ever reached out to them or did anything for them.”
Edwards’ position at the UN, like those of all other UN rapporteurs, is unpaid. As a part of her work, she is able to go on one official visit to a country for the purpose of investigating allegations of torture per year. Edwards says she supplemented this with several other trips, which she funded herself. In December 2024, she embarked on a self-funded trip to Israel to investigate the Oct. 7 atrocities, during which she visited southern Israel, including kibbutzim that had been decimated by Hamas, and spoke with victims and hostage families, among others.
Edwards said at the talk that she believes she was the only UN special rapporteur to request access to the video compilation assembled by Israeli authorities to personally review footage from the Oct. 7 attacks. According to Yeini, Edwards met repeatedly with hostage families, visited attack sites, and reviewed evidence firsthand.
Edwards told the Forward in a statement that the role of independent experts is “to document violations wherever they occur and regardless of the identity of the victims or the perpetrators.”
“Our credibility depends on maintaining public confidence that human rights are applied universally,” she said. “Where people perceive selectivity, double standards or political alignment, confidence is weakened.”
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The Netanyahu-Trump alliance reaches its breaking point
For decades, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s greatest political asset was the United States. Even Israelis who distrusted him, opposed him, or blamed him for deepening the country’s divisions often accepted one proposition: Netanyahu understood the U.S. better than any other politician. He knew how to preserve Israel’s position at the center of American politics and power, without which the country would be in danger.
That belief is no more.
As negotiators meet this week to discuss the future of the Middle East, Israel finds itself in an extraordinary position. Central questions under discussion involve Israel’s security, Israel’s freedom of military action, and the future of Iran’s nuclear and regional ambitions.
Yet Israel is not in the room. Iran is.
The result, in Israel, has been something close to wall-to-wall shock and condemnation. And the harshest criticism is aimed not at the agreement but at Netanyahu himself. Switzerland looks like a vindication of the deepest concerns of opponents who have long argued that Netanyahu mortgaged Israel’s bipartisan support in Washington in exchange for a close relationship with President Donald Trump.
“The strategic damage that this government is leaving behind in terms of our relationship with the United States is damage that will take years to repair,” said former Cabinet minister Izhar Shai.
Netanyahu “built Israel’s entire strategic position around President Trump,” Shai added. “But Trump does what is good for himself and for his voters. He does not act on behalf of the state of Israel.”
Someone might want to convey that message to Trump, who has repeatedly suggested that he determines what Israel can and cannot do, and publicly implied that Netanyahu follows his instructions.
Now, as Trump makes promises about Israel’s actions without Israel in the room, he’s solidified the international impression that the hallowed U.S.-Israel relationship has been reduced to that of a superpower dictating terms to an utterly dependent client. No American president from either party has treated an Israeli prime minister this way — at least in public.
An alliance close to fracturing
Many Israelis are confronting the once-unthinkable possibility that their country’s relationship with the U.S. has been materially damaged by the very leader who claimed unique mastery over it. The concern is not merely that Trump disagrees with Netanyahu. It is that influential figures in Washington increasingly appear to believe that Netanyahu helped draw the U.S. into a military confrontation with Iran based on assumptions that were flawed from the outset.
Since Netanyahu spent years narrowing Israel’s political base in the U.S., there’s nowhere for Israel to turn. Netanyahu’s repeated confrontations with Democratic administrations, beginning most dramatically with his 2015 speech objecting to President Barack Obama’s proposed nuclear deal with Iran, steadily weakened bipartisan support. His identification with Trump — whom he openly supported in the 2024 election — meaningfully deepened that trend.
Meanwhile, relations with many European governments deteriorated, especially during the cataclysmic Gaza war. The result is that Israel now finds itself with fewer reserves of international goodwill than at any point in recent memory.
For Israelis, the American relationship has never primarily been about aid. The billions of dollars in annual military assistance are important, but for a half-trillion-dollar economy they are not decisive. The real value of the alliance is strategic.
American backing provides Israel with a level of deterrence that no other country can offer. It shields Israel diplomatically, particularly at the United Nations. It anchors the network of trade, investment, technological cooperation and international legitimacy on which Israeli prosperity depends. Without that support, Israel would face far greater risks of diplomatic isolation, economic pressure and boycotts.
Israelis understand this intuitively, even if their politics do not always reflect it. It is their prosperous economy that finances a sophisticated military. International trade and investment help sustain that prosperity. Strong alliances help make those relationships possible.
Remove enough pieces from that structure, and eventually even Israel’s military power will begin to erode. Remove the U.S., and it could crumble.
A boon for Israel’s military foes
The immediate strategic implications of negotiations are also serious. If Washington agrees to constrain Israeli freedom of action in Lebanon as part of a broader accommodation with Tehran, as appears possible, Israel could find itself pressured by its strongest ally to withdraw from positions it regards as essential to its security. For residents of northern Israel, many of whom only recently returned home after months of displacement, that prospect is deeply unsettling.
And a weakened Israeli deterrent could strengthen Hezbollah politically as well as militarily. The organization is battered. But if Israel is forced to accept restrictions on its freedom of action while Hezbollah remains intact, the Lebanese government — which recently took risks by signaling a willingness to challenge Hezbollah’s dominance — may conclude that confrontation is no longer worth the danger.
In the worst case scenario, Hezbollah could emerge from the crisis with greater influence than before, emboldened to test Israel through provocations, targeted attacks or efforts to intimidate opponents inside Lebanon.
Israel’s military future as regards Iran also looks grim. The Islamic Republic has emerged strategically strengthened from this conflict. It’s all but certain that Tehran has no real plans to abandon its long-term nuclear ambitions, even if it accepts temporary restrictions. Israelis’ expectation now is that Iran will eventually resume enrichment activities — while Israel’s ability to respond militarily has been narrowed by understandings reached over its head.
That is why the current moment feels so dangerous. Israelis are considering, for the first time for real, that by relying on Trump, Netanyahu has wrecked the strategic framework that has underwritten Israel’s security and prosperity for generations. The October election may therefore become more than a referendum on the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack, Gaza or Iran. It may become a referendum on the central promise that sustained Netanyahu’s political career for decades: that whatever his faults, he knew how to manage America.
The post The Netanyahu-Trump alliance reaches its breaking point appeared first on The Forward.
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The White House cabinet is eating like your zayde
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is hawking a new diet: sauerkraut. Yes, lacto-fermented cabbage. And it’s catching on with Trump’s cabinet, according to The Wall Street Journal, which reported that Vice President JD Vance, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick are all heaping their plates with cabbage — apparently “drawn by the promise of slimmer waistlines and glowing skin.”
This claim may sound like it belongs in the marketing material for some sort of beauty product, or a scammy gas station supplement, rather than a jar of preserved vegetables. But RFK Jr. boasted that he lost 20 lbs in 30 days from eating mass amounts of the stuff. One might assume something like a tapeworm is responsible for such extreme weight loss — especially given Kennedy’s previous worm-related medical issues — but he asserts it’s all thanks to cabbage.
The diet, drawn up by one Dr. Sean O’Mara, an MD who advertises himself as an “executive biological consultant to high-performance leaders,” is apparently not just about sauerkraut; it includes other fermented vegetables, urges followers to also eat steak, snack on “old world cheese” and cut out alcohol and sugar.
Admittedly, this sounds like a fairly normal, low-carb diet. But sauerkraut is so core to the meal plan that members of the cabinet have taken to making their own, and carrying it around just to make sure they’re never without. Kennedy’s wife, Cheryl Hines, said on a podcast with Steven Miller’s wife, Katie, that she has had to refuse to stow a container of sauerkraut in her clutch when she and her husband go out for a nice evening. But, she said, he brings it anyway, presumably in his own bag. Or maybe tucked under his arm.
It’s hard to imagine anything more bubbie-coded than whipping out a jar of sauerkraut from a handbag while out at a nice dinner.
It’s not that Jews have some kind of patent on fermented vegetables; they exist in many cultures, like kimchi in Korea and miso in Japan. Sauerkraut specifically is common throughout European countries like Germany, Czechia and Russia.
But in the U.S., there’s a pretty strong association between Jews and pickles, whether they be sauerkraut or cucumbers, thanks to the deli culture imported with Jewish immigrants into the U.S. Jews created a pickle district on the Lower East Side, selling the preserved vegetables from pushcarts and spreading the food through the city. We’ve long been aware of the healthy gut biome effects of a lacto-fermented vegetable.
Ashkenazi food has long been made fun of for being gross — largely thanks to innovations like jarred gefilte fish, its beige-heavy color palette and, as the Wall Street Journal piece hinted at, the diet’s resulting gastrointestinal effects. Much of shtetl food culture was the result of hardship, and the need to preserve food through long winters, not an attempt for glowing skin and slim waistlines. The hardier the vegetable, the longer it lasted. Enter the cabbage. There are few foods less sexy than cabbage. (And I love cabbage.)
Which is why it’s so funny to see some of the most powerful men in the U.S. adopting the diet of a poor shtetl Jew — and doing so for aesthetic reasons.
There are a lot of weird diets and quasi-scientific buzzwords like “seed oils” and “clean protein” floating through the MAHA world that these American leaders often play to. But most of those, at least the ones promoted by men like Vance, have some cross-over focus on manliness and discipline — they’re about building muscle in some sort of primitive way. Think the carnivore diet or Kennedy’s obsession with beef tallow. Seeing these men turn to a diet I associate with my grandmother because they want to lose weight feels absurd, especially in the days of Ozempic for those with the funds to pay for it. Perhaps that does not have the right optics.
Of course, sauerkraut is nothing to be ashamed of. In recent years, Jews have been reclaiming pride in their food cultures; bespoke pickling classes have boomed. So the White House cabinet’s sauerkraut kick is really just them being really late to the shtetl chic trend. But you still should probably be ashamed of smuggling your own food into a nice restaurant, even if it’s sauerkraut.
The post The White House cabinet is eating like your zayde appeared first on The Forward.
