If you are in New York City and struggling with suicidal thoughts, you can call 1-888-NYC-WELL for free and confidential crisis counseling. You can also dial the 24/7 National Suicide Prevention hotline at 988 or go to SuicidePreventionLifeline.org.
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Yeshiva University is left in mourning after a beloved gay alum dies by suicide
(New York Jewish Week) — Before eulogizing their friend on Thursday night, Beth Weiss draped a rainbow flag with a Jewish star over the podium.
It was a potent symbol of the twin identities that Weiss and others who knew Herschel Siegel said he had struggled to reconcile, particularly as a student and 2021 graduate of Yeshiva University. Siegel died by suicide Friday in Atlanta, where he grew up and had been living.
Weiss said during the eulogy they recalled having “a conversation with a gay friend about what it felt like to be queer in the Orthodox world” for the first time with Siegel, a classmate at Y.U., the Modern Orthodox flagship in uptown Manhattan.
“I can’t tell you how invaluable conversations and connections like that are,” Weiss said. “We talked about our dreams for the future, but also the reality of how our future might look because of our queerness.”
Weiss’ comments, delivered at a memorial held on the Y.U. campus and organized by some of Siegel’s friends from college, reflect a narrative solidifying around Siegel’s death. Many believe — based on their conversations with Siegel, his social media posts and their own experiences — that Siegel had considered that there may have been no place for him as a gay man in the Orthodox community where he grew up and attended college.
Even as some in Siegel’s community have downplayed the focus on his sexuality following his death, friends say his suicide should be a wakeup call at a time when Yeshiva University is deeply divided over whether and how to include LGBTQ students. In recent years, the school has fought not to have to recognize an LGBTQ student group, even petitioning the Supreme Court for relief. A trans woman was also told she could no longer pray in a synagogue affiliated with the school.
Weiss told the New York Jewish Week that there are many “Orthodox queer people who are possibly suffering, who feel like they are alone, and who feel like they don’t have a future,” adding, “I know that Herschel felt that way at points in his life because he told me.”
Experts caution that it is a mistake to attribute suicides to single causes. Still, there is no question that LGBTQ youth are at increased risk, particularly when they are not accepted in their communities. According to a 2023 survey by the Trevor Project, a nonprofit focused on suicide prevention in the LGBTQ community, 41% of LGBTQ young people seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year.
Siegel made his struggle transparent. In an Instagram post from March that has circulated widely after his death, he wrote about how the word “abomination” in a Torah portion brought up trauma for him as a gay man within the Orthodox community.
“According to that trauma, my very EXISTENCE as a gay, Jewish, Male was an abomination,” Siegal wrote. “And even decades later, that fear-based thought pattern erupted into my consciousness, at the most unexpected of times.”
He then asked, “Do we ever REALLY heal from the deeply traumatic memories within us? Or is it rather a Journey, like many other emotions, and then we come to realize that one day we are at ease while riding ‘the trauma-coaster’?”
Siegel ended the post on a positive note, sharing gratitude for anyone who “has ever experienced a profoundly traumatizing event within your lives. … The fact that we made it this far is something to be proud of in and of itself!”
He died a month later, on the eve of the Shabbat when the weekly Torah portion includes the Jewish legal prohibition on homosexual intercourse, calling it an “abomination.”
“I think about the bravery, the heroism, the strength of this kid,” said Mordechai Levovitz, a therapist and the clinical director of Jewish Queer Youth, an organization that seeks to support and empower Jewish LGBTQ teens, with a focus on the Orthodox community. “I think any person at all willing to endure a community in a religion that is very cruel to him — and yet sees the value because there is also still value — is someone that I think we can look up to, and that we can learn from, and that we can be inspired by.”
He added, “But also, we can admit and witness and bear the fact that it is because of the community that we created that this kid could not find a future for himself and thought that it would perhaps be better off if he was not here, or if he did not exist.”
Not everyone who has commented on Siegel’s death is connecting it with his sexuality. Rabbi Ilan D. Feldman of Beth Jacob Atlanta, Siegel’s synagogue, wrote an email to the congregation saying that “our thoughts and tefillos [prayers] go out to the Siegel family, whose agony can never be fully fathomed, and who will be embraced and supported by us, their community.” Siegel is survived by his parents and five siblings.
Feldman presided over a funeral on Sunday that people who were present said was attended by about 200 people, with more than 450 tuning in on Zoom. Levovitz said that at the funeral, the rabbi referred to Siegel as being “mentally ill.” Mental illness is considered the strongest predictor of suicide.
Feldman told the New York Jewish Week over the phone that “even by reducing this story to a one-dimensional story of a guy who was gay, who committed suicide, we’re actually doing a disservice to gay people.” He also said Siegel’s family is distressed by the narrative, which they believe is untrue.
“The storyline of this particular case is an openly gay person who had wonderful relationships with the entire Orthodox community, including haredi Orthodox leaders,” Feldman said. “And now we’re going take this guy after his death, during his shiva while his family is grieving, and start talking about [how] gays are marginalized and whether this drove him to suicide, when this is the one case where an Orthodox community embraced a gay person with love and with no exceptions.”
But he acknowledged that there is “a big difference between pressures from the Jewish community and pressures from Jewish tradition,” which under Orthodox interpretations does not permit homosexuality.
“If he ever felt pressure, it was relieved by the love that he received in the community, but the pressure may have been there because Jewish tradition is inconsistent with gay activity,” Feldman said.
A source in the Atlanta community who said he had known Siegel since Siegel was a child said Siegel’s death comes on the heels of another suicide in the Atlanta Orthodox community, also of a young person who identified as a member of the LGBTQ community.
“There is a cloud of sadness. People just feel confused and lost. This is the second time in six months,” the source said. “It’s just resonating very hard for people. Young people taking their lives, it’s not supposed to be something that is normal and is regularly happening.”
Hundreds of people attended the funeral for Herschel Siegel last weekend in Atlanta. (Courtesy)
Chaim Nissel, a dean at Yeshiva University who was an associate provost during Siegel’s tenure as a student, spoke at the Thursday night gathering and said he had known Siegel well, and even had the student visit his home. (Nissel was originally named in the lawsuit by the YU Pride Alliance against the university but was dropped after Y.U. argued that he did not have authority over whether the LGBTQ student club was approved.)
“He struggled to reconcile his identity and love of Torah,” Nissel said. “He died from mental illness.”
Yeshiva University had previously released a statement about Siegel’s death.
“We are deeply saddened by the passing of Herschel Siegel, a member of the Yeshiva University family,” the statement said. “We express our deepest condolences to his family. May his memory be a blessing.”
Siegel’s family did not respond to a request for comment. People close to the family said they were too distraught to speak to the press. The source from Atlanta who knew Siegel since he was a child said the family was “angry for the way that this is being spun,” suggesting that Siegel’s sexuality should not be the only focus.
“I do resent anyone that is trying to make this about him being gay,” the source said. “It’s the chicken or the egg situation. Did being gay in the Orthodox community make his depression more triggering, or was it that he was depressed, and felt alone, which made being gay so much harder?”
Even his closest friends say it’s impossible to untangle those forces.
“Herschel struggled with mental illness and struggled with accepting himself as a gay Orthodox man,” said Emily Ornelas, a friend who was close to Siegel when he was at Y.U.
“That’s a reality,” Orneles said. “Gay people in any organized religion struggle with that. But I do wholeheartedly believe that by the end of his life, he had come to terms with and accepted himself and was able to love himself for who he was in whatever capacity he could. I feel that is true.”
Ornelas says she is choosing to remember the many bright spots in her friend’s life, rather than focus solely on trying to identify reasons for his death. She recalled the way he connected with children when the two staffed a Passover retreat, as well as his energy in his many theater performances at Y.U., the way his smile lit up a room.
“I remember that his hugs were absolutely crushing,” Ornelas said. “I think he could have cracked my ribs easily. I remember that when he smiled, he smiled literally with every single one of his teeth. You could probably count them. I can hear his voice. He has a very particular affect to the way he spoke, and I think it was like a tiny bit of a Southern drawl. He was just like a really big part of my life — and all of our lives — for a very long time.”
At the memorial service, Weiss exhorted others who might feel tormented about being gay in an Orthodox community to hold on, despite their pain.
“You are not alone,” they said, holding back tears. “You have a future, and you have people who love and see you fully. You have people who celebrate all the wonderful, beautiful parts of you. And if it feels like you don’t have those people yet, we are here waiting for you with open hearts.”
They then shifted to a “a message to everyone else here with us tonight” — those who identify as allies, and those who are just deeply sad about their friend’s tragic death.
“Be like Herschel,” Weiss said. “Be like Herschel and embrace and love each of us with enthusiasm and with joy. Be like Herschel and see us as the full, valid and nuanced human beings that we are. Be like Herschel, and support us unconditionally. Be like Herschel so that we can continue to be here even though Herschel can’t. And be like Herschel, so that this never ever happens again.”
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The post Yeshiva University is left in mourning after a beloved gay alum dies by suicide appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Sunkist Fruit Gems return after panic over loss of synagogue staple
(JTA) — Sunkist Fruit Gems, candies beloved for their throwable qualities at Jewish celebrations, will return after a brief panic over their discontinuation.
The sugar-coated gummies will be on shelves in early 2027 following an outpouring of “overwhelming support and enthusiasm shown by Sunkist Fruit Gems fans in recent days,” Sunkist confirmed to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
The company said it will collaborate with CandyRific, a Kentucky-based confectionery company, to continue the legacy of Sunkist Fruit Gems days after reports of the gummies’ demise.
The fruit gems tick crucial boxes for being hurled at bar and bat mitzvahs, wedding celebrations and other happy occasions: They are kosher, soft enough to avoid injuring celebrants and individually wrapped so they don’t get stuck on the floor.
Those attributes will be preserved in their relaunch. “Consumers can expect the same key product characteristics they know and love, including individually wrapped pieces, a soft texture, fruit flavors, and kosher certification,” Sunkist said.
EJewishPhilanthropy first reported Thursday that the fruit gems were being discontinued by Ferrara, a Chicago-based candy company, prompting memorial tributes in Jewish communities throughout the United States.
The fruit gems have been a staple at synagogues for generations. They were born from an overabundance of citrus in the 1930s, when the citrus harvester Sunkist transformed its surplus fruit into byproducts, according to a history published by the company. The candies evolved from Christopher’s Fruit Gems to take the Sunkist name in the 1960s.
Protests against their disappearance included an appeal in eJewishPhilanthropy penned by Sara Fredman Aeder, the executive vice president of programming at the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, headlined “Save the Fruit Gems.”
Sunkist’s announcement on Instagram that the fruit gems were “not going anywhere” was met with grateful replies.
“I panic-bought in bulk for my wedding next year,” said one commenter on Instagram. “Now I feel foolish lol. But enjoying a bunch of very yummy gummies.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Sunkist Fruit Gems return after panic over loss of synagogue staple appeared first on The Forward.
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Mamdani rolls out NYC’s first plan for fighting antisemitism — without defining the term
Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday unveiled New York City’s first comprehensive strategy to combat antisemitism, promising millions of dollars for security, hate-crime prevention and Jewish education as antisemitic incidents rise.
But the 30-page plan leaves unresolved a central source of tension between Mamdani and much of the Jewish community: what counts as antisemitism and when anti-Zionism crosses that line. That question has followed Mamdani since his first day as mayor, when he revoked an executive order from former Mayor Eric Adams adopting the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism. The IHRA definition considers most forms of anti-Zionism as antisemitic.
The strategy does not adopt a formal definition of antisemitism and offers little clarity on how the administration views anti-Zionism.
“New York City can and will leverage all of the tools at its disposal to combat antisemitism effectively without needing to adopt a definition for this specific form of hate,” the document reads.
Phylisa Wisdom, who leads the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism and crafted the plan, told reporters the city is taking an approach similar to the Biden administration’s 2023 national antisemitism strategy, which drew from several competing definitions and frameworks rather than choosing one. Those include IHRA; the Nexus Document, which says criticism of Israel or opposition to Israeli government policy is not necessarily antisemitic; and the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which offers a narrower definition.
Wisdom said the administration’s focus is less on settling that debate than on protecting Jewish New Yorkers regardless of their politics.
The Israel question
The question of how to define antisemitism has shaped the debate over pro-Palestinian protests at college campuses and outside synagogues, a persistent source of tension between Mamdani and Jewish organizations.
The strategy mentions the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and the war that followed as part of the rise in antisemitism, but does not directly link them. It points to a broader rise that began years earlier, including around the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh. Wisdom said antisemitism often spikes during conflicts involving Israel, as NYPD data showed after Oct. 7.
Mamdani has long sought to distinguish between his opposition to Israel and Zionism and his commitment to protecting Jewish New Yorkers. But he has repeatedly clashed with Jewish organizations and leaders over where anti-Zionist activism crosses the line into antisemitism. Those tensions intensified after a series of protests outside synagogues hosting events promoting real estate in Israel and the West Bank and his repeated accusations that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Some demonstrations have included chants calling for an “intifada” and other rhetoric Jewish leaders described as antisemitic and intimidating. Mamdani has condemned violence and expressions of support for terrorist organizations, but also defended the constitutional right to protest.
That prompted City Council Speaker Julie Menin to push legislation this past spring requiring the NYPD to develop a plan for establishing a buffer zone when demonstrations involve harassment, intimidation or physical threats. Mamdani, who had raised concerns about restricting protests, allowed the synagogue measure to become law without his signature.
The new antisemitism plan notes that neither the NYPD nor FBI considers protest outside a house of worship hateful or antisemitic, a position the Mamdani administration shares.
Menin told the Forward she had no input in developing the strategy. Wisdom said her office met with the City Council’s Jewish Caucus, of which Menin is a member. A spokesperson for Menin said the speaker was briefed Monday, a day before the plan was released.
What the plan includes: Security and prevention
The strategy comes as antisemitic incidents continue to move in the wrong direction. Recent NYPD statistics showed that in the first seven months of 2026, anti-Jewish incidents rose 8.5%, and 57% of the reported hate crimes in the city involved Jewish victims.
The new strategy attempts to tackle that problem through funding for security, education and cultural programs.
The Mamdani administration is putting $6.4 million into the Partners Against the Hate grant program that offers grants up to $10,000 for community-based initiatives. It is part of a $26 million investment Mamdani announced earlier this year for the Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes. The Jewish Community Relations Council of New York will serve as the anchor organization in the program, working with grassroots groups on programs that include education, victim support, data collection and combating online hate.
Another $1 million will go toward a security program aimed particularly at smaller religious institutions and vulnerable nonprofits that may not qualify for larger federal security grants. The money could pay for stronger door locks, shatter-resistant glass and security wands.
And the administration is restarting an interagency Security Infrastructure Working Group that brings together the NYPD, Department of Transportation and other city agencies to help synagogues and Jewish cultural institutions assess threats and improve security.
City Hall also plans to work with public schools to expand eighth-grade visits to the Museum of Jewish Heritage and continue teaching students about Jewish American history through existing curriculum. The administration is also investing $2 million to complete the Queens Holocaust Memorial and $2.5 million in the Center for New Jewish Culture in Brooklyn.
An informational campaign on LinkNYC kiosks across the five boroughs will highlight the contributions of Jewish New Yorkers, modeled after a campaign created to combat anti-Asian hate following the COVID-19 pandemic.
Outreach to Jewish New Yorkers
The plan comes after months of outreach aimed at hearing from a Jewish community deeply divided over Mamdani and his views on Israel.
Wisdom said the office, which includes another two staffers, conducted a five-borough listening tour in homes, schools and community centers. Participants represented a wide range of religious observance and political views.
Mamdani has also increased his own outreach. In August, he met with a group of rabbis from several denominations for a discussion about Jewish safety and belonging. Some of those rabbis pressed him over his rhetoric on Israel. He has also met with Hasidic and Orthodox leaders and maintains close relationships with progressive Jewish organizations.
Wisdom said that concerns raised during those private conversations helped shape the final strategy.
But she acknowledged that those meetings have not erased the central disagreement.
Mamdani has repeatedly accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, produced a Nakba Day video commemorating the displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s founding in 1948, and called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal.
During his mayoral campaign, he pledged to have Netanyahu arrested if he came to New York under an International Criminal Court warrant, though his administration later acknowledged that the city does not have the authority to carry out such an arrest. Netanyahu, during his speech at the United Nations last week, accused Mamdani of spreading lies about Israel and contributing to an atmosphere in which Jews feel unsafe. Mamdani rejected that criticism and stood by his views on Gaza.
Wisdom said in a press briefing on Monday the administration recognizes that discussions over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are part of the broader conversation about how Jewish New Yorkers experience safety in the city. But she said disagreement with the mayor on foreign policy should have no bearing on whether someone receives the protection of City Hall.
The administration rolled out the strategy on Tuesday with support from top city officials, several Jewish elected officials and liberal and progressive Jewish organizations, including the New York Jewish Agenda, Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Nexus Project, New Jewish Narrative, Jews For Racial & Economic Justice, Bend the Arc and J Street’s New York City chapter.
Jamie Beran, CEO of Bend the Arc, commended the decision not to enshrine a single definition, adding that doing so would be “unnecessary” and “a distraction from substantive policies.”
But the strategy did not meet the demands of the Anti-Defamation League, which had called for a “clear, formal definition of antisemitism the city actually uses.” ADL also asked that the plan ensure city contracts, pensions and procurements are kept “free of ideological boycotts.”
In a video announcing the strategy, the mayor said his conversations with Jewish New Yorkers over the past year repeatedly brought him back to the same concern of growing antisemitism. “This is not only unacceptable,” Mamdani said. “Today, we hold a responsibility to sustain and protect our Jewish neighbors.”
The post Mamdani rolls out NYC’s first plan for fighting antisemitism — without defining the term appeared first on The Forward.
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Evan Gershkovich’s prison memoir begins with a Soviet Jewish exodus
A few days after Russian security agents arrested Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich on a trip in March 2023, his lawyers showed him a slip of paper with messages from home. He was being held alone, in what Russian prisons call “quarantine:” two weeks without a cellmate before joining the general population. His eyes went straight to the note from his mother.
Soon he would start getting kosher food, Ella Milman wrote, and then added: “If you come home with sidelocks, I’ll understand.”
It was a joke, and a very Jewish one. Gershkovich grew up in a secular family of Soviet émigrés, where being Jewish had more to do with family history and dark humor than with religious practice. His mother was ribbing him that a few weeks of kosher prison food might send him home looking like a yeshiva boy.
Sitting across from the investigator building his espionage case, Gershkovich grinned. His mother, he realized, still had her sense of humor, and that was exactly what he needed.
The kosher food wasn’t a joke. That night, with Passover days away, a local rabbi sent him stacks of matzo.
The scene appears in This Cursed Beautiful Land: A Russian-American Story, Gershkovich’s memoir of his arrest, his 16 months behind bars and his release in the most elaborate U.S.-Russia prisoner swap since the Cold War. The book was published Tuesday.
Most of the coverage is about the prison. But Jewish history runs through the book from its first pages. Gershkovich’s great-grandfather was arrested during Stalin’s purges and vanished. His mother was laughed out of a journalism school application once the clerk saw her passport. And when he moved to Moscow as a young reporter, a Russian coworker needled him with an old stereotype about Jews and money.
The family that left
Gershkovich was born in New Jersey in 1991, two months before the Soviet Union fell apart. His parents had come over in 1979. Thousands of Soviet Jews were leaving at the time, helped by a U.S. law that linked trade with Moscow to whether its citizens were allowed to emigrate.
His mother flew out of Leningrad with her mother and ended up in Detroit. His father’s family came from Odessa and settled in Brighton Beach, the Brooklyn neighborhood people call Little Odessa. In those years, his father later joked, Soviet Jews who ran into each other on the street skipped the hellos and just asked where the other was going.
For his father’s side, the decision was easy. Gershkovich’s great-grandfather was arrested in 1937, at the height of Stalin’s purges, and never seen again. His grandfather Mark spent years moving from city to city, afraid of being targeted next, and later dreaded the day his own son would be drafted into the Soviet army.
A Jew on paper
Gershkovich’s mother, Ella, was born in 1957, a few years after the “doctors’ plot,” a Stalin-era campaign that accused Jewish physicians of conspiring to kill Soviet leaders. One of the doctors caught up in it had been a neighbor in her family’s communal apartment.
Her father had wanted to name her Etya, after his late sister. Worried that an obviously Jewish name would draw attention, her mother pushed for Ella instead. It didn’t matter. The family name Milman gave her away, and Soviet passports listed each citizen’s ethnicity. Hers said “Jew.”
Ella dreamed of becoming a writer. When she applied to the journalism department at Leningrad State University, the woman taking her application glanced at her passport and laughed. She studied shipbuilding instead, listened to the Rolling Stones, and heard rumors that the Kremlin planned to deport Jews to Birobidzhan, a remote Soviet region near the Chinese border that had apparently been set up as a Jewish homeland.
When she finally emigrated to America at 22, she sewed a pair of gold earrings from her late father into her skirt’s waistband to get them past customs. Once the plane took off, she couldn’t stop laughing and crying.
A generation later, her son became the journalist she wasn’t allowed to be, and then a prisoner of the state that had turned her away.
Ella and her husand settled in Princeton, New Jersey, where Gershkovich and his sister spent Saturday mornings with a Russian tutor, and holidays meant trips to the Russian groceries and Uzbek grills of Brighton Beach. Gershkovich came to think of himself as Jewish-Russian-American. Russia’s war in Ukraine later forced him to ask why that label had never included Ukraine, given that his father’s family came from Odessa.
The empty chair
In 2017, Gershkovich moved to Moscow to report for The Moscow Times. On one of his first days, he asked a colleague when staff got paid. She laughed and told him his Odessan roots were showing, a jab about Jews and money that served as his introduction to Russian workplace culture.
On a later trip to Odessa, he visited a Jewish museum that displayed a 1953 Soviet propaganda article from the doctors’ plot era. It claimed that the Joint, the New York-based Jewish relief organization, was a front for American intelligence. Gershkovich recalls thinking that Moscow was getting paranoid again, while hoping things hadn’t gotten that bad. A few years later, Russia accused him of spying for the United States.
Gershkovich’s arrest came a week before Passover. That spring, many American Jews left an empty seat for him at their Seders, and activists later sent him letters for Rosh Hashanah. Both gestures deliberately echoed the movement to free Soviet Jewry, the same campaign that had helped free his parents. Natan Sharansky, the most famous Soviet Jewish dissident, who was himself released in a 1986 prisoner swap, advocated publicly for his release.
In July 2024, two weeks after a Russian court sentenced Gershkovich to 16 years in a maximum-security prison, he was freed in a prisoner exchange in Ankara, Turkey. Jewish groups celebrated, and the Orthodox Union posted the traditional blessing thanking God for freeing captives.
His great-grandfather was taken in 1937 and never came home. Eighty-seven years later, his great-grandson did.
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