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The Army’s only airborne rabbi finds his congregation wherever he lands
FORT BRAGG, N.C. — At dawn on Friday, two soldiers showed up for physical training. Their rabbi was already waiting.
Black T-shirts. Gold ARMY across the chest. Nothing to set them apart. They blended into the formation — hundreds of soldiers under the pine trees as reveille cut through the morning. The flag rose. They saluted, stretched, climbed ropes, ran into the dark.
For 30 minutes, they were indistinguishable. Then everything shifted.
The three men walked into a meeting room inside a battalion headquarters, their shirts still damp with sweat. One soldier held out his left arm. The other draped a camouflage tallit over his shoulders. Rabbi Scott Klein reached into his backpack, removed a pair of black leather tefillin, and began wrapping them around a soldier’s arm — seven times, the way it’s always done, the leather biting just enough to remind you it’s there.
At 36, Klein serves one of the most unusual pulpits in American Judaism. He is one of 140 chaplains at Fort Bragg, the world’s largest military base. And he is the Army’s only Jewish chaplain assigned to an airborne unit — which means that jumping out of an airplane, for him, is not a metaphor for faith. It’s a job requirement.
One of the men praying beside him that morning was Jacob Abrams, 24, a specialist from Manhattan, Kansas. He found out about Jewish life on the base by accident, in the commissary, on a flyer for a challah-baking workshop stapled near the cereal aisle.
“Scott instantly made me feel included in the community,” Abrams said.
On Friday mornings, the two wrap tefillin together after physical training. On Friday nights, they welcome Shabbat together. But the relationship doesn’t end at the chapel door. Klein joins field exercises. He sleeps in tents. He paratroops into combat zones.
“There are days — many days — where you just don’t want to be there,” Abrams said. “Having your chaplain out there, who’s also embracing the suckiness with you, it makes it a lot easier to get through.”
It is an old idea, dressed in new camouflage: that you do not minister from a distance. You jump first.
A congregation with no walls
Later that morning, Klein climbed into his car and began driving across Fort Bragg.
The base stretches for miles, a city unto itself — schools, supermarkets, banks, gas stations, a Chipotle, three Starbucks, all of it sitting inside roughly 250 square miles, a map Klein has long since stopped needing to consult.
As he drove, he pointed things out the way someone points out a childhood neighborhood: the headquarters of the 82nd Airborne Division, the parade fields, the training grounds where soldiers prepare to leave for places he has already been.
He grew up nearly 900 miles from here, in Skokie, Illinois, where his world, for a while, stayed small. After college, he joined his father’s accounting firm, dedicating himself to fostering local economic development and helping small businesses scale. The work paid the bills, but what he loved most was driving community entrepreneurship from the ground up — the Jewish networking events he organized for young professionals, the restaurant back rooms he’d reserve, the texts he’d send to make sure people showed up, and the strangers he introduced who became business partners, then friends.
“I realized that when you connect people, you aren’t just building networks—you’re building the infrastructure of a community,” he said.
Then, in his late 20s, an Army recruiter asked if he had ever considered serving. Klein had always thought of himself as deeply patriotic. He served on Skokie’s Fourth of July parade committee, loved civic life and believed, as an American Jew, that serving his country was a responsibility.
“If I have the opportunity to serve my country,” he recalled thinking, “I can’t let the door slam shut.”
The United States is marking this week its 250th birthday, what Klein called a “monumental” moment in the life of the “American experiment.”
He spoke of Francis Salvador, the first Jewish soldier killed in the Revolutionary War; Haym Solomon, who helped finance the Continental Army; the Civil War, which produced the country’s first official Jewish military chaplain, Rabbi Jacob Frankel, commissioned by Abraham Lincoln in 1862; the half a million American Jews who served in the two world wars that followed.
“We aren’t passive observers of this 250-year history,” he said. “We are foundational stakeholders.”
Klein commissioned into the Army Reserve. What followed reshaped his life.
During deployments across the Middle East, he became what the military calls a lay leader, the person responsible for holding Jewish life together in places where no chaplain existed to do it. On Friday nights, that meant leading Shabbat services in Jordan, Iraq, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia.
During one deployment, he led a Passover Seder in Egypt for soldiers and diplomats, retelling the story of the Exodus on the banks of the river where it happened. He led High Holiday services at Guantanamo Bay. In Iraq, he lit a Hanukkah menorah inside one of Saddam Hussein’s former offices — a small, stubborn flame in a room built for someone who would have extinguished it.
Eventually, the distinction between lay leader and rabbi stopped making sense to him. Klein enrolled in rabbinical school while still in uniform, attending classes online from bases scattered across the Middle East — studying the Talmud in the region where rabbis first argued over its pages, sometimes logging in from bunkers, sometimes losing the connection mid-lesson, the line between ancient text and unreliable internet blurring into one continuous feed.
He was ordained in 2024. Soon afterward, he joined the ranks of more than 100 Jewish chaplains serving across the U.S. armed forces, which have roughly 10,000 active-duty Jewish military personnel. (Out of that total force, Klein is one of only about 10 to 15 Jewish chaplains serving on active duty in the U.S. Army). The Army sent Klein to Fort Bragg. There, he began building something more permanent.
‘Never plateau’
Klein pulls into the parking lot of one of the base’s supermarkets.
Inside, it looked like a large grocery store anywhere in America — wide aisles, fluorescent light, shoppers pushing carts past the produce and the canned goods. Klein headed straight for the bakery.
“See this?” he said, pointing to a stack of challah. “We didn’t have this before.”
When he arrived at Fort Bragg, it wasn’t something easy to find on base. Klein worked with the store manager to bring it in. Today, it helps sustain Shabbat for the more than 200 Jewish soldiers and their families who are stationed here.
He walked a few aisles over to the meat department and pulled open the door to a large refrigerated case with a “Kosher” sign taped to it: brisket, ribeye, ground beef, stew meat for cholent. Before Klein, the options were thin. Now the case stays stocked. When the meat comes in, he posts to a WhatsApp group and a Signal chat, and Jewish soldiers from one end of Fort Bragg to the other know to come get it before it’s gone. It is a community built less on sermons than on supply chains.
None of that, on its own, is unusual for a chaplain. But for Klein, it is not enough.
For the past two years, he has also served as the interim rabbi at Beth Israel, a century-old congregation in Fayetteville, about 15 minutes off base. The synagogue has around 100 members and an active Sunday school. A permanent rabbi has been hired and will move into the parsonage on its 10-acre property in August.
Klein also volunteers his time as a chaplain for the Fayetteville Police Department. He teaches “Torah on tap” classes at a local brewery. He recently finished a two-year fellowship for rabbis serving small-town Jewish communities, the kind of program built for people without a colleague down the hall to ask for advice.
He travels to rabbinical schools to recruit students who assume the only pulpit worth having is a sanctuary, showing them that there’s another version of the job — one that jumps out of airplanes, sleeps in tents, and answers a 3 a.m. phone call that no synagogue board ever will.
He is already a qualified paratrooper and recently earned his Air Assault wings — rigorous tactical credentials rarely held by military chaplains. Later this summer, he takes that same drive to a special operations unit.
“I set a goal for myself a long time ago to never plateau,” he said. “I’m in the right organization, because the Army has that culture: ‘Great, you’ve achieved this. What’s next?’ Even at 36, I feel like I’m just getting started.”
And it isn’t only about rank or certifications. “I want to continue learning in Judaism, in Torah,” he said. “But also just as a human. I have this itch to keep doing more.”
From phone calls to a first meeting
In the afternoon, Klein returned home.
On base, the houses are nearly identical — modest homes lined up along quiet streets, indistinguishable from one another unless you know which door to knock on. Inside, the living room was sparsely decorated, the furniture simple and functional. Klein shares the house with his wife, Eli, who teaches special education at a school on base, and Buddy, their 11-year-old goldendoodle, who curled up on a chair.
On the couch sat Paul Kenul, a 69-year-old retired U.S. diplomat who had flown in from Europe. Raised Catholic, he was now studying to become a Jew.
Klein balanced a laptop on his knees, scrolling through a passage from Pirkei Avot, a tractate devoted to ethics and moral teachings. Kenul leaned forward, listening closely, a pen in one hand and a notepad in the other.
Kenul grew up on Long Island, in a neighborhood that was almost entirely Jewish, except for him. He spent a career bouncing between Alaska and Heidelberg and Addis Ababa before landing, almost by accident, in Tel Aviv, working at the U.S. embassy. “I felt like I was home,” he said.
He lives in Poland now, with his wife, in a house with an Israeli flag flying in the garden.
For the past year, every Sunday, on the phone, the two men have worked their way through the Torah cycle. The first few months, Kenul said, he was “high” learning with Klein, mesmerized by a tradition he wished he’d found as a teenager.
For Kenul, the lessons had begun to feel like something more. “When I study with the rabbi,” he said, “I feel like I’m feasting.”
This week, for the first time, he flew in to meet Klein in person. “We hugged, and we just kept talking,” Kenul said matter-of-factly.
He talks now about the Torah’s cast of men who failed and were forgiven and failed again the way other people talk about relatives. “They feel like my ancestors,” he said. “They made so many mistakes. I can relate to that.”
Borrowed space, sacred time
The Watters Family Life Center for Counseling and Resiliency does not look like a synagogue, because it isn’t one. It’s a building the Army built for chaplains of every faith to share, and on Friday nights, for about an hour, it becomes one.
Past the kitchen, a walk-in storage room held boxes of Streit’s potato kugel, bottles of grape juice, a stack of siddurs, and “Shabbat in a box” kits donated by a Connecticut nonprofit — a Kiddush cup, a havdalah candle, a challah cover, and, inexplicably, a deck of playing cards. In the corner, leaning against the wall, rests a blue pop-up sukkah.
Klein passed out camouflage kippahs at the door.
About 15 people sat in folding chairs, more arriving until someone had to grab extra seats. Klein stood behind a small pulpit, a menorah on the stage behind him between an American flag and the Army Chaplain Corps flag. He’d traded his fatigues for a gray suit, no tie. The service moved through Hebrew and English, everyone following along in camouflage-covered siddurs.
It was the Shabbat before the Fourth of July, and the week’s Torah reading happened to be Klein’s own bar mitzvah portion — a text that describes the sudden death of Miriam. For Klein, the connection was heartbreakingly close; his own sister, Miriam, had passed away suddenly just a month prior.
He shared with the room how the Torah handles the loss with a striking, quiet brevity, offering no drawn-out account of public mourning. Instead, Jewish tradition teaches that a miraculous well of water traveled with the Israelites through the dry wilderness for as long as Miriam lived — and vanished the moment she died.
Klein’s sister moved through the world with that same quiet, life-giving impact, he said. “She didn’t need the spotlight; she just brought sustenance and life to everyone around her,” he reflected. “She never would have wanted a loud, public display of grief. She would want us to keep moving forward through the desert.”
Then he recited the Mourner’s Kaddish.
A chaplain’s job, as the Army defines it, comes in three parts: nurture the living, care for the wounded, honor the fallen.
The first happens every day — soldiers walking in with money trouble, a marriage coming apart, the slow pressures that build until someone needs to talk to a person who won’t repeat what’s said.
The third comes without warning. When a soldier dies, in training or in combat, the call goes to the chaplain. Klein has stood with families the moment they find out. He has escorted remains across state lines, sometimes across continents, making sure both military protocol and Jewish tradition are followed at every step. At Dover Air Force Base, where the country’s dead return home first, chaplains are often the ones waiting on the tarmac.
“Escorting a fallen service member home is the most sacred, heavy duty we have,” he said. “It is the ultimate expression of our promise never to leave a fallen comrade.”
After the prayer for peace and a prayer for the country’s soldiers, the room sang Shalom Aleichem and Klein poured Kiddush into plastic cups. There was babka, black and white cookies, and fresh challah baked by a soldier’s wife, still warm when it reached the table.
There was also cake: carrot cake left over from his shloshim service for Klein’s sister, and a cookie cake for the country’s 250th — grief and birthday cake sharing a tablecloth. It was the whole evening in miniature: whatever needed holding, the room found a way to hold it.
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Nominee for Wisconsin governor appeared with podcast host who defended ‘Camp Auschwitz’ t-shirt
Rep. Tom Tiffany, Wisconsin’s Republican nominee for governor, is facing heat for appearing on a podcast hosted by an online personality with a history of antisemitic remarks and jokes about Adolf Hitler.
“The Quartering” podcast host Jeremy Hambly has said Adolf Hitler had “actually done some good things,” joked with guests about the Holocaust by calling it the “Hall of Cost” and saying it cost “around 6 million bucks,” and defended a “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirt worn during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot as “dark humor.” In 2023, The Quartering was sponsored by Antelope Hill Publishing, a white nationalist publisher that marked Hitler’s birthday each year by offering discounts on books written by and about the Nazi leader.
Tiffany discussed his gubernatorial bid on a December episode of the podcast, as reported by the Milwaukee Courier — news that emerged after Tiffany had criticized a leading Democratic candidate for appearing with popular progressive streamer Hasan Piker, who has been embraced by Democratic Party candidates even as he has championed terrorist groups as righteous fighters against Israel — leading to accusations he trafficks in antisemitism. In a recent speech to college students, Piker blasted Democrats who “fund ICE” and “fund Israel.”
On the podcast, Tiffany, who is running unopposed on the Republican side to replace Gov. Tony Evers, a two-term Democrat who announced his retirement, also accepted Hambly’s offer to volunteer for his campaign.
In the interview with Tiffany, Hambly said he “will do everything” he can to elect the Republican as governor and offered to help the Tiffany campaign alongside Scott Presler, a prominent “Stop the Steal” activist who has been affiliated with the anti-Islamic group ACT for America.
“I can bring Scott Presler out. We can doorknock for you,” Hambly said. When Hambly asked how supporters could get involved, Tiffany directed listeners to his campaign website to sign up as volunteers.
The resurfaced interview comes as Tiffany has sought to make antisemitism an issue in the governor’s race by criticizing Democratic state Rep. Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist whose campaign has gained momentum in the competitive Aug. 11 Democratic primary, for appearing on a livestream hosted by Piker.
“Remember what [Hong] said the day after we had all these socialists win recent elections?” Tiffany said on The Jay Weber Show last week. “Wisconsin, you’re next.” He later warned that voters “need to wake up” before Hong, whom he said was “going to hang around with an antisemite,” is elected governor.
The Tiffany campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the candidate’s podcast appearance.
Hong defended her appearance on Piker’s show, saying, “Just because I am on a platform certainly does not mean that I endorse everything that has been said by either the hosts or other people who have gone on.”
Wisconsin Republicans have been accused by Democrats of trying to boost Hong in the primary because they believe she would be easier to beat than her rivals in the general election. Recent polls show Hong with a slight lead.
Emily Stuckey, a spokesperson for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, told the Forward in a statement that “Tiffany is cozying up to antisemitic extremists who have praised Hitler and encouraging them to volunteer with his campaign — it’s clear he is far too extreme to represent Wisconsin.”
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Trump rejects Mamdani vow to arrest Netanyahu in NYC
(JTA) — Mayor Zohran Mamdani says he’s still thinking about whether he should arrest Benjamin Netanyahu the next time the Israeli prime minister is in New York City. Not gonna happen, President Donald Trump stepped in on Monday to say.
“Benjamin Netanyahu will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form, while in the United States of America,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Trump’s post came days after Mamdani said that he is in “active conversation” with the city’s Law Department about detaining a foreign leader like Netanyahu, who faces an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for alleged actions related to Israel’s war with Hamas. Netanyahu often attends the United Nations General Assembly in Manhattan in September and is planning to do so this year.
“I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in The Hague,” Mamdani reiterated, in an interview with the New York Times, referring to the court’s seat in the Netherlands.
He also hedged on his earlier pledge, seeming ready to defer to the city’s lawyers. (The legal consensus has been that a warrant by a court not recognized by the United States is unenforceable. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said he is seeking the dismantlement of the ICC.)
“I’ve also said that I will follow the laws that we have here in New York City because I believe that there is an importance in following the law as a leader who presides over our city,” Mamdani told the Times. The interviewer, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, prompted him to elaborate. “Meaning that whatever the law allows me to do in New York City, that’s what we will do, but we won’t be writing our own laws to that end,” Mamdani said.
Trump jumped to the defense of Netanyahu, who is up for reelection later this year.
Netanyahu, he said, is busy fighting the Islamic Republic of Iran, and that the “only ones that should be arrested are the people that led Iran into this unprecedented SPIRAL OF DEATH AND DESTRUCTION, something that should have been dealt with years ago, by previous Presidents!”
Trump’s comments come after months of speculation over how an attempted arrest of Netanyahu could pit New York City law enforcement against the United States. Mamdani told reporters after a private meeting with the president last year that the two men did not discuss his vow to arrest Netanyahu. Mamdani has said he would also push for the arrest of Russian President Vladimir Putin, were he to enter New York City.
Some Mamdani Democratic allies were also pouring cold water on the prospect of an arrest.
California Rep. Ro Khanna, who is often aligned with Mamdani’s pro-Palestinian politics, said on the Fox News Channel on Sunday that, in his view, Netanyahu “can come to the U.N. Assembly.”
“The ICC and ICJ have a legal process. That case will go forward,” Khanna said, adding that he’s focused on cutting military aid and stopping weapons sales to Israel. “But, you know, I’m not for creating a spectacle. The U.N. is a place that people can come to.”
Dan Shapiro, a former U.S. Ambassador to Israel under Barack Obama, speculated that Mamdani’s plan could backfire, since an attempt to arrest Netanyahu would “give him a political boost at home” as Netanyahu fights for reelection. “That would be an own goal,” Shapiro wrote on X.
Republican New York City Council member Inna Vernikov, who is Jewish and has been a staunch Mamdani critic, wrote to Rubio requesting that the State Department issue Mamdani a “stern warning.” She also asked that the department issue an opinion on whether arresting Netanyahu would “violate U.S. law resulting in a prosecution and/or criminal action taken by the federal government against Mayor Mamdani.”
A New York City mayor has previously booted an international leader from a U.N.-related event. In 1995, Rudy Giuliani had Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, ejected from a U.N. concert at Lincoln Center, drawing criticism from then-President Bill Clinton’s administration.
Danny Danon, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, wrote on Saturday that Netanyahu will be attending the U.N. General Assembly in September. “And if anyone should be arrested, it is @NYCMayor Zohran Mamdani,” he said.
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Where does Andy Burnham, the new British prime minister, stand on Israel and antisemitism?
(JTA) — Andy Burnham officially became Britain’s new Labour prime minister on Monday, replacing Keir Starmer who resigned following the party’s disastrous showing in local elections in May.
Starmer left behind a mixed record on antisemitism. He purged the party of its image as hostile to Jews under former party leader Jeremy Corbyn. But at the same time, attacks against Jews in Britain have risen in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attack on Israel, and uncertainty is at a high.
Starmer’s successor has spent much of his political career over the past decade cultivating close ties with Britain’s Jewish community. As the former mayor of Greater Manchester, home to one of Europe’s largest Jewish populations, Burnham frequently spoke out against antisemitism, attended Holocaust commemorations and worked closely with Jewish communal organizations.
Yet in the lead-up to his installation as prime minister, Burnham also signaled a shift in Labour’s mainstream position on Israel and Gaza, including support for greater pressure on Israel.
Burnham’s comments about Labour’s leadership contest prompted a sharp rebuke from the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council, which expressed “significant concerns” over his framing of Gaza and Israel’s war with Hamas. The umbrella groups also said they welcomed his commitment to tackling antisemitism.
Here is a look at some of Burnham’s views on the subjects and how they might impact his party’s policies going forward.
Early support for Israel and a two-state solution
During Labour’s 2015 leadership contest, Burnham said at a Jewish community debate that his first foreign trip, should he win the Labour leadership, would be to Israel. He opposed a boycott of Israel, asking, “What message would it send?” while stating that he supported a negotiated two-state solution.
In a questionnaire sent to him that year by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, he also stated that he supported “two states living side by side in peace, and recognized by all of their neighbors.” However, he added that he supported “an end to occupation and illegal settlement building by the Israelis, and an end to the rocket and terror attacks by the terrorist group Hamas.”
He also made it clear at the time that he did not support West Bank settlements, telling the PSC, “Labour recognizes that the settlements and their continued expansion remain key obstacles to resolving the conflict, as [then party leader] Ed Miliband has said, they are both illegal and immoral.”
Labour’s antisemitism crisis
Burnham was vocal about tackling antisemitism when the Labour Party became embroiled in allegations of antisemitism under Corbyn’s leadership between 2015 and 2020,.
Corbyn had in 2012 mural defended a mural depicting hook-nosed Jewish bankers playing Monopoly on the backs of exploited workers. (He later said he regretted the defense.) He called representatives of Hamas and Hezbollah “friends.”
Burnham told the Board of Deputies in 2019 that Labour had failed to deal with antisemitism complaints “firmly, quickly and decisively” and warned that the party had lost the confidence of many Jewish voters.
“It is inconceivable to me that a party which has prided itself on its record on racism could have become embroiled in an antisemitism crisis,” he said.
In 2020, the U.K.’s Equality and Human Rights Commission found Labour had committed unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination related to antisemitism.
Oct. 7 and rising antisemitism
In the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack, Burnham issued a statement with his deputy mayor saying, “We condemn without reservation the appalling attacks in Israel by Hamas. Nothing justifies the taking of innocent lives in such a barbaric and indiscriminate manner.”
He also stated that “Israel had a right to defend itself, and protect its citizens, in line with international law”
He told the Jewish community that he had spoken with Greater Manchester’s chief constable, who assured him there would be an increased police presence alongside Jewish community organizations. Burnham said local leaders were “determined that all our communities in Greater Manchester will be kept safe” and that “we will never tolerate any form of hatred on our streets.”
Manchester synagogue terror attack
Barely two years later on Yom Kippur 2025, Manchester became the target of a major terror attack, outside Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation. Two people were killed amid a police response.
“Manchester stands together and we will not allow division in our communities,” Burnham said, visiting the synagogue soon after what he described as an attack on the entire city.
Golders Green ambulance attack
Burnham spoke out in April when four Hatzola volunteer ambulances were set ablaze in London’s heavily Orthodox Golders Green neighborhood. “This is another terrible incident that will concern Jewish communities in London and in Greater Manchester who have faced appalling antisemitic attacks in recent months,” he said.
Recent comments on Gaza
Burnham has been critical of Israel’s military campaign in the aftermath of Oct. 7. He doubled down in a leadership campaign video released last week and took his own party to task.
He condemned Hamas and once again rejected antisemitism, but he argued Britain should “do more to put pressure on the Israeli government,” including considering further restrictions on arms exports and action against illegal West Bank settlements.
“I know many people feel that at the start of Israel’s military action in Gaza, my party didn’t get it right, and I am sorry about that,” he said. The party was “too slow to call for a ceasefire.”
He called images from Gaza “a scar on our collective conscience.”
His comments reflect a parliamentary push across the board that Britain should do more to take action against Israel, including supporting a ban on all Israeli goods coming from the West Bank — something that Ireland and other European countries have been pushing for.
In his video, Burnham stopped short of describing Israel’s actions as genocide, saying that such a determination should be made by international courts.
Jewish communal reaction
The video drew a swift response from the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council. Burnham had seen “first hand the links between hatred of Israel, antisemitic extremism and deadly violence against British Jews,” the groups said.
They urged Burnham and other political leaders to “show the utmost care in their rhetoric” at a time when antisemitism in Britain had become “more normalized, more extreme and more violent.”
British Jews will watch closely how Burnham balances his longstanding engagement with the Jewish community and his increasingly critical stance toward the Israeli government.
The Campaign Against Antisemitism’s Chief Executive Gideon Falter read aloud an open letter to Burnham on Monday calling on him to take a stand against the rise in antisemitism in the country. “Your legacy will not be remembered solely in terms of tax rates and hospital waiting times,” Falter said. “It will be whether Jews were murdered or thrived in Andy Burnham’s Britain.”
Board of Deputies President Phil Rosenberg congratulated Burnham on X, and welcomed the new prime minister’s “early commitment to tackling antisemitism,” and that the Board “will work with his administration towards the U.K. playing its strongest role in global peace and security.”
Ephraim Mirvis, the country’s chief rabbi, posted a photo on X of himself and Burnham and offered a blessing. “He assumes the immense responsibility of leadership at a time of great challenge, both at home and abroad,” Mirvis said. “May he be blessed with the wisdom, strength and good judgment to keep our country safe and may his service bring prosperity and harmony for all.”
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