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The settlers’ attack on Huwara is not the Orthodox Judaism I grew up on
(JTA) — Nighttime in Huwara, a small Palestinian town in the West Bank. Jews in large skullcaps and sidelocks, prayer fringes dangling from their waists, responding loudly to the cantor: “Yehei shmei raba mevurach leolam u’leolmei olmaya” (“May His great name be blessed, forever and ever”) — the words of Kaddish, a regular daily prayer that can also be said to mourn the dead.
The gloom outside is illuminated by an enormous bonfire of cars, shops and homes belonging to the Palestinian residents of the village, which the Kaddish-reciters have set on fire, in revenge for the horrific and heartrending murders, hours before the pogrom, of brothers Hillel and Yagel Yaniv (may their memory be a blessing) and for other recent terror attacks in the area.
One Palestinian was killed during the rioting by these Jewish settlers. Dozens of wounded Palestinians were evacuated to hospitals, some from smoke inhalation, others from beatings and stabbings. A family was evacuated by IDF troops, moments before they might have perished in the flames that took their home.
This wasn’t just any Kaddish, yet another one of those said and repeated by any observant Jew multiple times a day, sometimes in mumbling fashion. This time it was a Kaddish for Judaism itself.
I grew up in a small town in central Israel, in a classic “dati leumi” or national religious community whose ideology combines Zionism and Orthodox Judaism. I studied in typical religious institutions: a school in the state-religious education stream, a high school yeshiva and a “hesder yeshiva,” which combines advanced religious studies with military service. I was also very active in the religious Zionist Bnei Akiva youth movement, as an educator and leader.
Even today I live in a religious community in Jerusalem, and my young children study in schools that belong to the state-religious education stream.
The Judaism that I know and by which I try to live is a Judaism that operates according to the commandment “walk in His ways” (Deuteronomy 11:22) and the Talmud: “As He is gracious you should also be gracious, as He is compassionate you should also be compassionate” (Shabbat 133b:4-6). This Judaism operates according to the verse from Leviticus, “The land shall not be sold permanently, for the land belongs to Me, for you are strangers and [temporary] residents with Me.”
By contrast, the Judaism that the militant settlers imbibed — or distorted — led one of the pogromchiks, he too in skullcap and sidelocks, to speak in Hebrew words I understood but whose language I could not not comprehend. “There is something very moving here,” he told a reporter. “Jews won’t be silent. What the army can’t do, what the police will never do, simple Jews come and carry out a simple act of vengeance, setting fire to anything they can.”
The same Judaism led Davidi Ben Zion, deputy head of the Samaria Regional Council, also an observant Jew, to say blithely, shortly before the pogrom, that “Huwara should be wiped off the earth — no room for mercy,” and “the [Jewish] guys in Huwara right now are behaving precisely like guys whose brothers were massacred in cold blood at point-blank. The idea that a Jew in Samaria is a diasporic Jew who will be stabbed in the heart and politely say thank you, is childish naivete.”
That same Judaism led Israel’s finance minister, Betzalel Smotrich, the de facto governor of the West Bank, to publicly support a tweet by another coalition member calling to “wipe out” the village.
In the name of this Judaism, denizens of hills and outposts abuse the Palestinians daily, with the aid or under the blind eye of the IDF. A national Jewish settlement endeavor has been taking place for two generations now, which despite the good intentions of some of its practitioners, has included land theft, institutionalized discrimination, killing and hatred. An endeavor under which the current coalition, the most observant ever, only grows and intensifies.
In ordinary times life is not black and white. The Palestinian side also has a significant part in the story. The violence comes in great force and cruelty from there as well, and its many victims and circles burn the soul and draw many good people into the cycle of vengeance. The solution, too, is complex and hard to see, even far off on the horizon. But there are moments when things are actually very clear, clarifying the gray areas, when the choices are between life and death, and good and evil.
This evil version of Judaism is a lethal drug, which through a historical twist of fate gained ascendance over our ancient tradition. Combined with nationalism and majority hegemony in the Land of Israel, it has become a conflagration, one that has long since spread beyond religious Zionism — what Americans might refer to as “Modern Orthodox” — to the haredi, or ultra-Orthodox sector, and Israeli society in general.
An entire generation of Jews has been raised on this Judaism of hate, contemptuous of anyone who is not Jewish, of any display of weakness, of compassion. To whom Judaism is not the keeping and continuation of our tradition, observing commandments or studying Torah, but a worship of “Jewish might” (“Otzma Yehudit,” the name of a far-right political party) and limitless greed. In this Judaism, traditional values like modesty, pity and charity are signs of weakness, or remnants of a pathetic and feeble Christian morality that under no circumstances are to be shown to a stranger, the other, those who are not like us.
What we need now is not accommodation, nor soft words and platitudes. Neither will an obvious and empty condemnation of the pogrom do a bit of good. What we need now — having seen the elected officials who represent this religious population, having witnessed their nationalist Judaism — is a policy rooted in a tradition they abandoned. We should treat those who distort Judaism as the Mishnah tells us to treat all evildoers: “Distance yourself from an evil neighbor, and do not cleave to a wicked person” (Ethics of the Fathers 1:7). We need to announce that we want no part in the feral growth that has sprung up here, that this is not the tradition we grew up on, this is not the Torah we studied, and this is not how we wish to live our lives and raise our children.
Let us return to tradition and start over.
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A famed rabbi’s yeshiva reopens for students for the first time since World War II
(JTA) — Dovid Hofstedter was visiting Belarus five years ago when he discovered that a historic Jewish school had turned into something else.
Hofstedter, a Canadian rabbi, was joining a group of rabbis from around the world at the Radin Yeshiva, nestled in the small town of Radun in western Belarus. The school was founded in 1869 by the famed Lithuanian rabbi Israel Meir Kagan, known as the Chofetz Chaim, and housed 300 students before World War II.
As Hofstedter delivered a lecture in the building, he was surprised to see it fill up with locals, who then gradually wandered out. He realized they didn’t know the building had once housed a yeshiva in a town where no Jews live today.
Instead, people had walked in expecting a play — and left when they didn’t get one.
The Radin Yeshiva had been converted into a theater, with a stage and red seats, Hofstedter told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Like many Jewish sites across Eastern Europe, where the Nazis’ annihilation was followed by decades of Soviet rule that stifled Jewish memory and communal life, the school’s history had been buried.
“In other places that I’ve been to in Eastern Europe, some yeshivas were used as a post office,” said Hofstedter. “Some were used as government buildings.”
This month, Hofstedter and another group of 100 international rabbis filled the building again, this time to inaugurate the reopened Radin Yeshiva, now fully restored to serve Torah students as a functioning school.
Yad Yisroel, a nonprofit dedicated to strengthening Jewish life in Belarus, bought the yeshiva building from the municipality of Radun (or Radin, according to its Yiddish pronunciation) in 2025. That spurred a year of planning and construction, headed internationally by Hofstedter, who founded the Torah study organization Dirshu, and locally by Moshe Fhima, who directs Yad Yisroel’s projects and leads a yeshiva in the southern city of Pinsk.
The restoration team replaced the building’s roof and windows, which had deteriorated over years of neglect. Inside, they installed a new Torah ark and recreated the wooden lecterns and chairs that filled the yeshiva before World War II. A library of books is being transported from Israel to stock the school’s shelves.
The Radin Yeshiva closed after the outbreak of World War II, when the Soviet Union occupied the region and Soviet authorities seized the building. Nazi Germany captured Radun in 1941. Some yeshiva students escaped to Japan, where they received aid from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Rabbi Mendel Zaks, the Radin Yeshiva’s then-leader and the Chofetz Chaim’s son-in-law, fled in 1941 to the United States and reestablished the yeshiva in New York City. In the 1950s, the new school moved upstate to Suffern, New York, where it remains active.
Meanwhile, more than 2,000 Jews from Radun and neighboring villages were interned in a ghetto; most were killed by the Germans and local police.
Hofstedter believes that the Radin Yeshiva will draw interest from Jewish communities across Belarus. Though the country’s 30,000 to 50,000 Jews today are largely secular, Hofstedter said a subset of the community has shown interest in reconnecting with facets of their Jewish identity that were quashed under the Soviets, and the yeshiva can serve as a focal point for that rediscovery. Many of its students will also come from abroad, as Orthodox Jews make regular pilgrimages to study the Chofetz Chaim’s teachings and visit his gravesite.
The Chofetz Chaim, who lived from 1838 to 1933 and whose sobriquet is the title of his first and most famous book, was widely hailed as the leading Jewish scholar of his generation. His establishment of the Radin Yeshiva brought the town fame in the Jewish world of Eastern Europe, where current-day Belarus and Lithuania were home to many “Litvak” Jews who followed a rigorous, anti-Hasidic religious tradition. He remains influential among Orthodox Jews globally for his works codifying Jewish law and ethics, especially his guidance on refraining from “lashon hara,” or “evil speech” about others, said Hofstedter.
There are recent signs of renewed attention to Belarusian and Lithuanian sites of Jewish heritage, according to Alena Kuliounich, the deputy chair of the Union of Belarusian Jewish Public Associations and Communities. The Volozhin Yeshiva, another jewel of Lithuanian Jewish history founded in 1803, reopened as a museum in 2024. Today, no more than a handful of Jews are estimated to live in Volozhin, now in western Belarus.
“Volozhin demonstrates that a historic Jewish site can attract considerable interest even in the absence of a substantial local Jewish community,” Kuliounich told JTA.
Hofstedter, whose parents survived the Holocaust in Auschwitz and Mauthausen before rebuilding their lives in Toronto, had a different vision for the Radin Yeshiva. He explicitly did not want it to become a museum.
“We didn’t want to just have some sort of tribute to the past,” said Hofstedter. “We wanted to be in continuity with the future, the teachings of the Chofetz Chaim for future generations.”
At the Radin Yeshiva’s rededication ceremony, he was moved to watch rabbis from the United States, Israel, Britain, France and elsewhere join to celebrate the Chofetz Chaim. The Lithuanian sage’s teachings are followed by Jews across Orthodox movements. It was rare to see rabbis with a range of backgrounds and beliefs “come together with such a feeling of solidarity,” said Hofstedter.
“There was an enormous amount of emotion at that gathering,” he said. “After almost 100 years, to be able to come back to the Chofetz Chaim’s yeshiva, to rejuvenate it and have the yeshiva functioning — it was just incredible.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post A famed rabbi’s yeshiva reopens for students for the first time since World War II appeared first on The Forward.
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Police shoot dead assailant outside Israeli Embassy in Serbia
(JTA) — An assailant with knives attacked a police officer guarding the Israeli Embassy in Serbia overnight before the officer shot him dead, according to Serbian authorities.
Interior Minister Ivica Dačić called the incident a “terrorist attack.” The attacker had two knives and shouted “Allahu Akbar” at the officer 15 minutes after midnight Wednesday morning at the embassy in Belgrade. One knife hit the officer’s face.
The officer, a member of the Gendarmerie unit who was identified only by the initials D.S., killed the assailant on the spot, according to the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in Belgrade. The attacker, who was dressed in black and whom Dačić described as a minor, has not been identified and was believed to be from the western city of Šabac.
Dačić said he raised Serbia’s terrorism threat level to “red,” the highest degree, triggering heightened security monitoring and increased police presence around infrastructure facilities and places where large crowds gather.
Dačić added that Serbian security services had been monitoring the attacker, who was “known to be a supporter of the Islamic State” and had posted an image of the terror group’s flag on his Instagram account.
Avivit Bar-Ilan, the ambassador of Israel to Serbia, said she was “deeply disturbed and shocked by the terrorist attack.” She thanked the member of the Gendarmerie for “his courage and decisive response.”
The attack was the second on Belgrade’s Israeli Embassy in two years. In June 2024, a man seriously wounded a police officer outside the embassy by shooting him in the neck with a crossbow.
Wednesday’s incident came the day after Israel held parliamentary elections, with preliminary results suggesting that neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition nor the opposition bloc had secured a governing majority.
Serbia had its own pivotal election on Sunday, with the country’s student-led protest movement defeating the bloc led by longtime nationalist leader Aleksandar Vučić. Under Vučić, Serbia deepened ties with Israel, including through a new joint combat drone manufacturing plant.
The victorious Student List movement said in its platform, “We will not be complicit in the systematic attempt to destroy the Palestinian people that Israel is carrying out in the Gaza Strip, and we will intensify the delivery of humanitarian aid to Palestine in order to save lives and reduce the number of casualties.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Police shoot dead assailant outside Israeli Embassy in Serbia appeared first on The Forward.
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Netherlands reverses course, will sit out Eurovision again over Israel’s participation
(JTA) — The Netherlands is withdrawing from the Eurovision Song Contest, reversing an announcement that it would join the event and citing “sensitivity” over Israel’s participation.
The Dutch organization that oversees public broadcasting, the Nederlandse Publieke Omroep, or NPO, said on Tuesday that it failed to find sufficient support from broadcasters to ensure a Dutch artist could go to Eurovision.
“We have known for some time that Israel’s participation elicits various reactions in society and causes discussion and division,” said Jurre Bosman, NPO’s media director. “This is also the case among broadcasters and staff, and we understand that sensitivity.”
NPO said last month that the Netherlands would reenter Eurovision in 2027, when the world’s largest music competition will take place in Burgas, Bulgaria. The Netherlands boycotted the contest in May 2026, alongside Spain, Ireland, Iceland and Slovenia, because of Israel’s inclusion.
NPO’s pledge to rejoin Eurovision overrode a decision by the Dutch network Avrotros, which usually oversees the Dutch entry. Avrotros withdrew from Eurovision in August, saying the event “can no longer be considered neutral” with Israel taking part amid “the severe humanitarian suffering in Gaza and the ongoing restrictions on press freedom.”
Initially, NPO believed there was “sufficient support” among public broadcasters to allow the Netherlands to return, said Jet de Ranitz, the chair of NPO’s executive board. But the decision sparked backlash. Earlier this month, about 400 public broadcasting employees signed a letter titled “#NotMyEurovision” to NPO’s management and board, urging the organization to reconsider returning to the contest.
“We only want to send an artist or artists and staff to the festival if they can count on the full support of one or more broadcasters,” Bosman said.
The contest will still be broadcast in the Netherlands by the network NOS, as it was this year.
Eurovision director Martin Green said he was “deeply sorry” that the Netherlands would not participate, adding that the organizers understood the decision and “respect the strength of feeling behind it in the Netherlands.”
Ireland will also remain absent from Eurovision next year. The country’s broadcaster RTÉ said in September that “Ireland’s participation cannot be justified given the appalling and ongoing loss of lives in Gaza and the humanitarian crisis there.” In Spain, the head of broadcaster RTVE also said he favored a continued boycott.
Czechia pulled out of the event this month, but its public broadcaster cited budget cuts as the reason.
The controversy over Israel’s inclusion in Eurovision has prompted mass protests. The 2026 contest drew 131 million viewers, down 35 million from the previous year.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Netherlands reverses course, will sit out Eurovision again over Israel’s participation appeared first on The Forward.
