Uncategorized
We Should Be Building More Jewish Institutions and Buildings — Not Downsizing Them
Rabbi Eli C. Freedman, Senior Rabbi Jill L. Maderer, and Cantor Bradley Hyman lead a service marking Erev Rosh Hashanah at Rodeph Shalom in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US, Sept. 6, 2021. REUTERS/Rachel Wisniewski
A few weeks ago, driving through West Philadelphia with my son, I pointed out the streets where my grandparents once lived and the places where an older generation of our family once belonged.
We ended up talking about my long-shuttered synagogue, Beth T’filah in Overbrook Park. It was a few-hundred-family, postwar shul — modest in scale, but central to the rhythms of Jewish life that shaped my childhood. Later that evening, wanting to show him what that world looked like, I searched online for old photographs.
What I found stunned and troubled me.
Despite being a student of history — Philadelphia history, specifically — I was unprepared for what appeared on my screen. Image after image of synagogues I had never even heard of: scattered throughout Strawberry Mansion, Logan, West Philadelphia, and Wynnefield Heights.
These weren’t simple storefront shuls. They were grand structures with limestone façades, soaring sanctuaries, and stained-glass windows that radiated pride. Community centers that once throbbed with life. Physical evidence of a Jewish world far deeper and more vibrant than I had ever understood; stories of families and countless lives lived mere miles from where I grew up, yet entirely unknown to me.
My son leaned over my shoulder, studying the images with urgent curiosity. “This was all here? We had this many synagogues?” he asked, scrolling through sanctuaries the size of concert halls.
He knows American Jewish life as something smaller, more cautious, more scattered. These images showed him — and reminded me — that we once built with astonishing boldness. That we were visible, rooted, unafraid.
Most of these buildings no longer house Jewish life. Many are churches now; others stand abandoned or have disappeared entirely. Hidden City Philadelphia’s haunting photographs of the last synagogues of Strawberry Mansion capture this painful truth: magnificent sanctuaries built for bustling communities now sit silent, their pasts forgotten by most who walk by.
This is not just Philadelphia’s story. The same pattern of memory and erasure appears in Detroit, St. Louis, Newark, Cleveland, Chicago, and dozens of other cities. Entire Jewish neighborhoods — once dense, spirited, and civically intertwined — have faded from view.
What They Built, and Why
It is worth remembering how and why these communities emerged. In the mid-20th century, Jewish families, many first- or second-generation Americans, moved to new neighborhoods seeking opportunity, safety, and stability. Veterans returned from war and built small businesses. Women organized sisterhoods and ran charity circles. Men’s clubs held debates, breakfasts, and social events. Hebrew schools, JCCs, Zionist youth groups, choirs, lecture series, and summer camps created the thick connective tissue of Jewish life. These weren’t simply clusters of Jewish families; they were ecosystems of belonging.
At the center of each ecosystem stood the synagogue – not just as a place to pray, but as a civic anchor: a social hub, a public square, a home for both the sacred and the ordinary. People went there for weekday minyanim and Hebrew school pickups, for community meetings and interfaith dialogues, for holiday carnivals and debates about Israel, for fundraisers and grief support. For everything. The synagogue was where American Jewish life displayed its fullness.
Our grandparents and their peers understood something we risk forgetting: Jewish life must be built. It does not survive on good intentions. It does not thrive on nostalgia. They had little money, limited political power, and uncertain futures; yet they erected schools before they had enough students, synagogues before they had enough members to fill the pews, and community centers before they knew how they would pay the heating bill. They assumed a Jewish future and constructed toward it.
The Danger of Our Caution
Today we are more cautious. We consolidate, close, downsize, and strategize. We measure risk before we imagine possibility. We worry about demographics and budgets and “market realities.” In an age of rising antisemitism, cultural erasure, and digital amnesia, the instinct to retreat has never been stronger or more dangerous.
When Jewish visibility shrinks, when communal footprints recede, when institutions atrophy, the void does not stay empty. Others fill it, often with hostility.
I understand the fear. Antisemitism is not theoretical, it’s spray-painted on our synagogues, screamed at our students, legislated in international forums. Jewish communities are smaller than they were. Intermarriage rates are high. Affiliation is down. These are facts, not talking points.
But here’s what else is true: dispersion makes us more vulnerable, not less. When Jews scatter, when we become invisible, when our institutions disappear, we don’t become safer – we become isolated targets. The antisemite doesn’t stop hating because the synagogue closed; he simply faces less organized resistance. A community that cannot gather cannot defend itself. A community without institutions cannot transmit its values, protect its members, or advocate for its interests.
Jewish survival has never been secured by retreat. It has always been secured by presence — visible, confident, communal presence. By building synagogues and schools and youth groups and cultural institutions. By creating Jewish spaces where identity is transmitted, where belonging is felt, where children grow up understanding that they are part of something larger and older and enduring. This is not recklessness. This is how minorities survive in hostile environments: through solidarity, visibility, and the infrastructure of mutual support.
What We Owe the Future
Driving through Philadelphia, I tried to convey this to my son: Jewish life is not something you simply inherit. It must be constructed, sustained, reinforced.
Our grandparents did not build out of sentimentality. They built out of responsibility, conviction, and love. They believed that their children and grandchildren would need places to pray, learn, gather, argue, celebrate, and mourn. They built because they believed Jewish life mattered in America and deserved permanence.
We need that mindset again; not as a wistful tribute to a vanished past, but as a practical and moral imperative. At a moment when antisemitism is resurgent and Jewish visibility is contested, we cannot afford minimalism. We should be founding more schools, not fewer. More synagogues, not fewer. More youth programs, more minyanim, more cultural centers, more visible Jewish infrastructure.
I know the objections. I’ve heard them all, often from people I respect.
“Those synagogues emptied out — why repeat the same mistakes?” We’re not talking about blind replication. We’re talking about recovering the audacity to build while learning from both successes and failures. The mid-century model had flaws — exclusivity, rigidity, the costs of suburbanization itself. But the alternative we’ve chosen — building little to nothing, consolidating endlessly — guarantees decline. You can’t iterate on what you refuse to create.
“Young Jews want something different — they’re not joiners, they want authenticity and flexibility.” Every generation believes it has invented a new kind of Judaism. Yes, forms must evolve. But the underlying need for physical Jewish space where real relationships form, where children absorb identity through presence and participation, where community becomes tangible — that need hasn’t changed. Digital community kept us connected during COVID, but you cannot transmit Jewish identity through a screen. You cannot raise Jewish children on Zoom.
“We can’t afford it — demographics are against us, costs are too high.” Our grandparents were poorer. They faced quotas, discrimination, and far more virulent antisemitism. They built anyway. Resource constraints are real, but they’re often cover for lack of will. And the math works in reverse: not building costs more. Every shuttered Hebrew school is a generation we fail to educate. Every consolidated synagogue is a neighborhood we abandon. Managed decline is still decline, just slower and more expensive.
“Consolidation is smart stewardship — better one strong institution than several struggling ones.” There’s a difference between strategic consolidation and institutional surrender dressed up as prudence. Yes, merge when it genuinely strengthens. But we’ve spent two decades consolidating, and Jewish life hasn’t gotten stronger — it’s gotten smaller, more distant, more fragile. At some point, “stewardship” becomes a euphemism for retreat.
The isolation crisis is real. American institutions of all kinds are weakening. Loneliness is epidemic. These are not reasons to build less — they are reasons to build more.
And it is happening. Despite the challenges, Jewish communities across North America are building. The Stanley I. Chera Sephardic Academy in Manhattan has grown from 20 preschool students in 2011 to 240 students through sixth grade in 2025, adding campuses and expanding rapidly.
New York Jewish day schools saw their largest single-year enrollment increase since 2020, growing by over 4,000 students in 2023-2024. Post-October 7, UJA-Federation of New York launched new subsidies responding to what they call “the surge” — a spike in demand for Jewish schools, camps, and synagogues. Eighteen synagogues across the United States are now operating or preparing Jewish after-school programs, serving nearly 300 students and growing. From Brooklyn to Los Angeles, independent minyanim continue to flourish, creating new models of engaged Jewish community for young adults.
These are not isolated examples — they represent a broader pattern of Jewish communities choosing to build rather than retreat.
The work begins with individual commitment and communal organization. Start by showing up. Attend that weekday minyan. Enroll your child in Hebrew school. Join the board of a struggling synagogue. Volunteer at the JCC. Donate to build, not just to maintain. Support new initiatives even when they feel risky. Push back against the reflex to consolidate and retreat. If your community lacks the institutions you want to see, gather a minyan of committed people and create them.
My son looked at those photographs with amazement, wondering how such a world could exist without him ever hearing about it. The truth is that the Jewish world he will inherit depends entirely on what we choose to build now.
Earlier generations left us institutions robust enough to carry us through a turbulent century. With far greater freedom and far more resources than they ever had, we have no excuse for shrinking our ambitions.
If they built so much with so little, then we — for our children and theirs — must do no less.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Uncategorized
EU seeks to advance trade ban on Israeli settlements
(JTA) — The European Union could be leaning toward banning trade with Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Foreign ministers debated various tactics to respond to the settlements on Monday at their monthly council meeting in Brussels, against the backdrop of rising violence by settlers and efforts by the Israeli government to expand settlements in Palestinian territories.
In a press conference following the meeting, the EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said one possibility had stood out.
“The option that got the most support was banning the trade with illegal settlements,” she said. All 27 member states consider Israeli settlements in the West Bank to violate international law.
Kallas added, “We tasked the ambassadors to take this work forward, and probably will also have an extraordinary meeting on this.”
No decisions have yet been made, and the path forward is uncertain. Some EU member nations favor aggressive action against the settlements, while others are unlikely to back any measures that take aim at Israel. A number are in the middle and have not decided whether they support trade bans.
The level of agreement between European governments needed to enact a partial or full trade ban on Israeli settlements remains an open question. Kallas said it was the European Council’s legal opinion that voting on trade issues called for a qualified majority, meaning that 15 out of 27 states would have to vote in favor, representing at least 65% of the EU population.
But she also acknowledged that legal experts disagreed about how much backing was needed for a trade ban. “You can always find different lawyers who come up with different ideas,” she said.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar accused Kallas of an “obsessive campaign against Israel” in a post on X. “There was no consensus. There was no qualified majority. In fact, there was no majority at all,” he wrote, adding, “Tricks like this do nothing to advance our shared interests.”
The EU has hotly debated measures against Israel as settlements in the West Bank have expanded and settler violence has sharply intensified over recent years. The Israeli NGOs Peace Now and Kerem Navot said in a report last week that “the current Israeli government has advanced de facto annexation of the West Bank at an unprecedented pace.”
The ministers considered measures including a stricter export licensing system, higher tariffs and a partial or outright ban on goods produced over the pre-1967 lines. The options were first presented in a paper last week by the European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, as pressure mounted from European governments.
Kallas said these potential moves were not “options against Israel,” but “options against the illegal settlements that undermined the two-state solution.” She told reporters before the meeting that member states had been pressing for a trade ban on Israeli settlements, saying, “Everyone agrees that the situation in the West Bank is really intolerable.”
In May, the EU sanctioned Israeli settlers over violence against Palestinians after Hungary’s new government, led by Peter Magyar, gave its approval and allowed the states to reach a consensus.
To protest the Gaza war, the commission last year proposed suspending the EU’s free trade agreement with Israel as set out under the EU-Israel Association Agreement, the cornerstone of economic and political cooperation between Europe and Israel. The proposal was not advanced because it lacked the majority support of 15 member states.
The EU is Israel’s largest trading partner, accounting for 33.1% of its imports and 29.4% of its exports in 2025, according to a summary on the European Commission website, which did not provide data on settler goods. The free trade agreement does not apply to goods originating from Israeli businesses located over the pre-1967 lines.
Revoking the association agreement requires unanimous approval from the EU’s 27 member states, while a partial suspension, such as freezing the free trade agreement, calls for a qualified majority. Germany, Italy, Hungary and Czechia have consistently opposed such suspensions.
Israel’s most vocal critics in Europe, including Ireland and Spain, have pushed for suspending the association agreement along with proposing their own import bans at the national level. Ireland now holds the rotating presidency of the European Council, a six-month term that ends in December 2026.
The legal basis of trade restrictions on Israel lies at the heart of debates in the EU. Support from a qualified majority is sufficient to enact a commercial policy, while changes in the common foreign and security policy — such as sanctions — require unanimity.
Some legal scholars have argued that an EU ban on imports from Israeli settlements should be imposed as a trade measure rather than a sanction, making it easier to pass.
A group of 40 scholars said in an open letter last month to Kallas, trade chief Maroš Šefčovič and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen that a blanket ban on settlement imports had a legal basis under the EU’s common commercial policy. Claims that unanimity was needed for the prohibition were “grounded in political rather than legal considerations,” they said.
The scholars also referenced an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice in 2024, which said that Israel’s military control of Palestinian territories in the West Bank constituted an illegal occupation.
“In that regard, it should be noted that the EU Court of Justice has ruled that, in its acts, the EU is ‘bound to observe international law in its entirety,’” they said.
Daniel Mariaschin, Honorary CEO of the pro-Israel Jewish advocacy organization B’nai Brith International, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that reducing trade “would only weaken one of Europe’s most important partnerships in the region.”
“There are those within the EU who are looking for any way to undercut Israel’s international standing, and this is yet another example,” Mariaschin said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post EU seeks to advance trade ban on Israeli settlements appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
PEN America president, defending Israel’s critics, resigns after report warns of threats to Jewish authors
(JTA) — The president of PEN America resigned over the weekend in protest of a report on boycotts targeting Jewish and Israeli authors, part of yet another round of internal division over Israel at the literary free-speech institution.
Dinaw Mengestu, an Ethiopian-American novelist and Bard College professor, told The Atlantic he was stepping down because he believed the PEN report, “A Silent Moratorium,” failed to defend the free-speech rights of participants in the movement to boycott Israel.
“It’s the First Amendment that allows all of us to engage in boycotts, not PEN America,” Mengestu told the publication. “PEN America as a free expression organization is supposed to defend that right.”
The author did not respond to multiple Jewish Telegraphic Agency requests for comment, but in an Instagram post Monday alluded to an interest in creating a new organization to rival the prominent nonprofit, which defends the free expression rights other writers.
In response to an interview request, PEN sent a statement to JTA saying it was “grateful” for Mengestu’s leadership and would “respect” his decision. The statement also alluded to PEN’s own past turmoil: “We tell hard stories, in politically challenging moments, about writers from a range of perspectives, even when it’s uncomfortable for us given our own recent history.”
In its report, published on its blog, PEN described “Jewish and Israeli writers who feel that the mainstream literary world is increasingly shutting them out because of their identity, nationality, or views.” Interview subjects include several Israel critics, as well as literary agents who assert that they face more difficulties signing Jewish authors after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and amid the subsequent war in Gaza. The report also repeatedly cited a JTA report about a 2024 viral list of “Zionist” authors to boycott.
Among other details, PEN’s report revealed that Israeli novelist Etgar Keret and public radio host Ira Glass had cancelled a planned live event in Australia over fears of threats and protest.
“This silencing and exclusion of writers is a threat to what PEN America is fundamentally committed to defending: a culture of free expression for all,” according to the report.
In addition to the report, PEN also altered its institutional policy toward cultural boycotts, which the organization has long opposed. Although its report on Jewish authors asserted that boycotts “threaten the free expression rights” of their targets, the revised guidelines say that the group will also defend the right of writers to participate in boycotts.
Mengestu’s resignation comes at a perilous moment for Jews facing cultural boycotts, both within the standard-bearers of PEN and elsewhere. PEN’s Jewish former longtime CEO stepped down in 2024 following months of blowback from rank-and-file authors who felt the organization was insufficiently critical of Israel and caused PEN to cancel a festival for global authors.
Since the leadership change, PEN leadership has published and retracted a condemnation of a boycott effort trained at an Israeli comedian and also published a report cataloguing Israel’s “cultural destruction in Gaza.”
Mengestu had assumed the role of board president in 2025. But PEN’s report about Jewish and Israeli writers on Thursday, he wrote, “makes clear that [change] will not happen.”
The Anti-Defamation League said it was “deeply troubled” by Mengestu’s resignation Monday. “Freedom of expression means opposing efforts to boycott, silence, or exclude writers because of their identity or nationality,” the organization tweeted, saying that the author’s decision to leave PEN over his objections to the report on Jewish authors “sends a chilling message.” Jewish authors also objected.
“Imagine running a free expression org and resigning because it refuses to blacklist authors based on their nationality,” the author David Zweig wrote on X, musing whether Mengestu would object to boycotting authors from his birth country: “Ethiopia doesn’t exactly have a good human rights record.”
In response to The Atlantic’s story that quoted sources from inside PEN who were critical of his resignation, Mengestu wrote a lengthy Instagram post Monday in which he stated, “This piece is about trying to suppress constitutionally protected speech,” criticized past PEN reports critical of the BDS movement, and added, “What PEN America fails to understand is that boycott is a form of dialogue.”
He announced his intention to “help make something better,” receiving affirmative comments from notable authors including Viet Thanh Nguyen, Angela Flournoy, Jewish pro-Palestinian novelist Jess Row and Pulitzer Prize-winner Benjamin Moser, author of a forthcoming history of Jewish anti-Zionism.
Other Jewish authors on the left were among those defending Mengestu’s decision to step down.
“Dinaw is one hundred percent correct that this kind of fake victim propaganda can be used to support anti-Boycott legislation which violates the First Amendment and is everywhere as popular support for Palestinians grows,” author Sarah Schulman wrote on Facebook. Calling PEN’s blog about Jews “one of those fake anti-semitism pieces,” Schulman added, “If PEN wants to survive, they have to get out of the Israel/Zionism business.”
The post PEN America president, defending Israel’s critics, resigns after report warns of threats to Jewish authors appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Church of England backs study of Palestinian Christian document accusing Israel of genocide
(JTA) — The Church of England’s legislative body voted Monday to encourage churches across England to engage with a document produced by Palestinian Christians that accuses Israel of genocide despite requests from Jewish organizations and Britain’s chief rabbi to reject it.
The document is titled “Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide” and is also known as Kairos II, after the Palestinian Christian movement Kairos Palestine that produced it. It describes Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as a genocide, states that Israel is a “colonial enterprise built on racism,” and says decades of “occupation,” “apartheid” and “settler colonialism” are at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The vote on Monday does not adopt the accusations as church doctrine but says the church should hear the documents as “heartfelt expressions of the lived experience of Palestinian Christians,” and to engage with them in order to better understand the conflict.
Ahead of the debate in York, several Jewish organizations expressed concerns, and Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis asked Synod members to reject the amendment. Mirvis called Kairos II “deeply concerning” and that it “risks undermining decades of careful relationship-building” between Christians and Jews.
“It is truly shocking that a document which purports to speak in the name of truth contains so much falsehood,” he said.
Afterwards, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Phil Rosenberg, issued a statement calling the passage of the motion “highly problematic.”
“Kairos Palestine may come from a place of genuine pain, but the falsehoods and distortions of Kairos II, including its erasure of Jewish identity and experience, is a prescription for more division and not the answer to conflict in the Middle East,” he said.
“This document reflects the pain and trauma of the Palestinian people. As a pastor, I hear the cry of our Palestinian Christian sisters and brothers — a cry that rises from the ruins of Gaza, and from the violence and oppression of the West Bank,” she said.
She added, ”I also hear the concerns of the chief rabbi, the co-leads of the Movement for Progressive Judaism, and the Board of Deputies, and I thank them for their honesty.” She said the church remained opposed to antisemitism and committed to safety for Israelis as well as Palestinians.
The Synod debate followed Mullally’s visit to the West Bank in June, where she met Palestinian Christian communities in Birzeit. During the visit she said, “I will use my role as Archbishop to seek the peace you desire and the freedom you deserve.”
The debate marks the ascendance of Israel-related issues in another major church, after the Catholic Church’s Pope Leo XIV angered Jewish groups soon after being elected last year by endorsing an investigation into whether Israel committed genocide in Gaza.
The post Church of England backs study of Palestinian Christian document accusing Israel of genocide appeared first on The Forward.
