Hamas fired three rockets from the Gaza Strip at the Tel Aviv area, the first time Israel has had missile fire in months and another sign that the Israel-Hamas war has resumed.

No one was injured by the rockets, which set off warning sirens in several suburbs adjacent to Tel Aviv. One was shot down by Israel’s missile defense system and two others fell in open areas.

The rockets came days after Israel ended its ceasefire with Hamas, conducting airstrikes targeting the terror group’s leaders in the Gaza Strip. And they came hours after a rocket sent by the Houthi terror group in Yemen triggered warning sirens in central Israel and interrupted proceedings at Israel’s parliament, the Knesset.

On Wednesday, Israel also resumed its ground operations in Gaza, retaking parts of the Netzarim corridor, an area previously held by the Israeli military that splits the southern and northern halves of the territory.

On Wednesday morning, mass protests had erupted in Jerusalem over the war’s resumption, which protesters said endangered the 59 hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza. Netanyahu cited Hamas’ refusal to release the hostages in his announcement that fighting would resume.

Federal officials have detained a Georgetown University researcher who they said was “spreading Hamas propaganda,” expanding the number of arrests under the Trump administration’s push to crack down on perceived antisemitism on college campuses.

Badar Khan Suri, an Indian national who is a postdoctoral fellow, was arrested on Monday, according to a petition filed by his lawyers and first reported by Politico.

Suri has not been charged with a crime, nor was he named in news coverage about pro-Palestinian protests at Georgetown last year. But he has attracted attention because of his social media posts and because he is married to another Georgetown student, Mapheze Ahmad Yousef Saleh, who is the daughter of a senior Hamas official.

Saleh, a graduate student at the school’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, is a U.S. citizen. Her father, Ahmed Yousef, was an adviser to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, whom Israel assassinated. Yousef criticized Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel as a “terrible error,” a rarity among associates of the terror group.

Suri was considered “deportable” under the same provision that the Department of Homeland Security cited when arresting Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University earlier this month, department officials said. That provision, rarely exercised, allows for non-citizens to be deported if their activities are deemed to be at odds with U.S. foreign interests, even if they have not committed a crime.

“Suri was a foreign exchange student at Georgetown University actively spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media. Suri has close connections to a known or suspected terrorist, who is a senior advisor to Hamas,” tweeted Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant DHS secretary. “The Secretary of State issued a determination on March 15, 2025 that Suri’s activities and presence in the United States rendered him deportable under INA section 237(a)(4)(C)(i).”

Suri is awaiting trial in Louisiana, where Khalil is being held — though this week a judge ordered the Trump administration to move Khalil to New Jersey, where he was when his lawyers filed a petition challenging his arrest.

Like Khalil, Suri has come under scrutiny from pro-Israel watchdogs. A February article about the couple and their ties to Hamas in the Jewish News Syndicate highlighted Suri’s social media posts in the immediate wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel, in which he cast doubt about incidents of alleged violence. Canary Mission, an anonymous pro-Israel group that compiles dossiers on pro-Palestinian activists, has maintained a file on Saleh.

According to a 2018 article in the Hindustan Times, Saleh and Suri met when Suri joined a humanitarian delegation to Gaza in 2011. The couple married in 2014 and had a son, named for the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, while living in India before coming to the United States.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote that a “leftist Deep State” was working to “thwart the people’s will” in Israel and the United States, adopting President Donald Trump’s worldview and rhetoric about the institutions in his country’s government.

“In America and in Israel, when a strong right wing leader wins an election, the leftist Deep State weaponizes the justice system to thwart the people’s will,”  They won’t win in either place! We stand strong together.

The tweet, posted Wednesday afternoon in English and then in Hebrew, comes as Netanyahu is under fire for a number of controversial decisions that, critics say, disregard the rule of law or Israeli popular will:

• Employees in his office are being investigated for illicitly receiving funding from Qatar.
• In recent days, Netanyahu announced his intent to fire Ronen Bar, the head of Israel’s Shin Bet security service, which is investigating the Qatar ties. Netanyahu says he has lost trust in Bar.
• His government reinstalled the far-right politician Itamar Ben-Gvir as national security minister, over the objections of the attorney general.
• He resumed fighting against Hamas in Gaza, ending a two-month ceasefire, which triggered mass protests in Jerusalem.

Netanyahu’s language resembles Trump’s. The president has long railed against the “deep state” — a term that connotes career government officers and bureaucrats who, in the minds of their critics, take control of the government from its elected leadership.

Netanyahu’s tweet drew criticism from his opponents.

Commanders for Israel’s Security, a group of retired Israeli military leaders who have long criticized Netanyahu, wrote in Hebrew, “The will of the people, today, is for a secure state that strengthens trust in its leaders, fully liberal-democratic, for the return of all the hostages now, for a rehabilitation of the destruction that was allowed on 10/7, and for true equality of the burden” of military conscription.

Abraham Foxman, the former longtime head of the Anti-Defamation League, also criticized the post.

“No Prime Minister Netanyahu, respectfully, in America and I hope and believe in Israel, the justice system protects the people’s will against all those that would try to usurp it,” Foxman wrote. “God bless the people and democracies of Israel and America.”

Netanyahu has been Israel’s prime minister for nearly 15 of the past 16 years. His tweet comes as large swaths of Israelis want him to resign. Close to half of Israelis, according to a recent poll, want him to resign immediately. Another 24.5% want him to resign once the war is concluded.

But his tweet got one statement of support. Elon Musk, the billionaire adviser to President Donald Trump who is now slashing the U.S. federal bureaucracy, responded with the “100%” emoji.

 

When Sen. John Fetterman said he loved the Israeli operation that sent exploding pagers to members of Hezbollah, he probably never expected that Israel would give him a beeper, too.

But that’s what happened this week, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed Fetterman, an outspokenly pro-Israeli Democratic lawmaker, to his office in Jerusalem.

The beeper handover took place during an exchange of gifts. The Pennsylvania senator gave Netanyahu a framed news article about an effort to memorialize Netanyahu’s brother, the fallen Israeli soldier Yoni Netanyahu, in Philadelphia — where Netanyahu lived as a teenager.

Netanyahu’s gift was smaller — and didn’t explode.

“What can I give a man who has everything? How about giving him a beeper?” Netanyahu said, handing over a small silver box to Fetterman. “This is a silver-plated beeper. The real beeper is, like, one-tenth the weight. It’s nothing, but it changes history.”

Fetterman responded, “When that story broke, I was like, ‘Oh, I love it, I love it.’ And now, it’s like, thank you for this.”

Pagers belonging to Hezbollah members exploded across Lebanon in September, wounding and killing many, in addition to a number of civilians, in a long-planned Israeli operation. The operation came 10 days before Israel killed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, in an airstrike and two weeks ahead of an Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon targeting Hezbollah. That conflict ended in a ceasefire in late November.

Fetterman has praised the beeper operation before, including in comments to a representative of the militant right-wing pro-Israel group Betar US.

And Netanyahu has gifted a pager to a U.S. official before. In a visit to the White House last month, he gave one to President Donald Trump. That one was plated with gold.

The mayor of Miami Beach has rescinded his proposal to evict and defund a local independent theater over its screening of an Oscar-winning documentary on Israeli demolitions in the West Bank, following a public outcry.

In his original resolution last week, Mayor Steven Meiner, who is Jewish, described the film titled “No Other Land” as antisemitic, and proposed that the independent theater that screened it, O Cinema, have its lease in the Miami Beach Historic City Hall revoked and its funding withdrawn.

But at a Miami Beach City Commission meeting Wednesday, Meiner deferred to an alternative proposal calling for the theater to “highlight a fair and balanced viewpoint,” according to the Associated Press.

The alternative proposal came after five of the city’s six commissioners announced they would not support Meiner’s effort to evict the theater. Earlier in the week, over 600 filmmakers signed a letter in support of the theater.

A vast majority of attendees at Wednesday’s meeting opposed the eviction proposal, according to the Miami Herald.

“The community has spoken clearly today: They will not tolerate censorship of the arts,” Miriam Haskell, a lawyer representing O Cinema on behalf of the Community Justice Project, a legal aid group, said to the Miami Herald. “We will remain vigilant against future retaliation against O Cinema and other cultural institutions for choosing to portray or not portray a particular viewpoint.”

“No Other Land” won the Academy Award for best documentary earlier this month. It has drawn criticism from Israeli officials and their supporters as well as pro-Palestinian activists who oppose working with Israelis.

O Cinema screened the film earlier this month after Meiner sent a letter to the theater’s CEO, Vivian Marthell, urging her to block its release.

In his letter, Meiner referenced Miami Beach’s large Jewish population and described the film as “a one-sided propaganda attack on the Jewish people.”

On Wednesday, Meiner described his original efforts as a “public safety measure” in response to rising antisemitism but praised the resolution that passed.

“I really am appreciative of the passion that we saw today,” Mayor Meiner said to the Miami Herald. “Unity means we are striving for what’s best for our city and our community.”

In polarizing times, here’s something both sides can agree on: Opponents of Donald Trump’s agenda are struggling to offer any resistance. 

“Democrats are like hamsters on a wheel, running furiously and going nowhere,” crowed Liz Peek of Fox News. 

“If Trump’s first Presidency was characterized by widespread revolt, his second term has so far been defined by the lack of dissidence,” lamented Brady Brickner-Wood in The New Yorker. 

A high-profile New York rabbi is trying to change that. Working with other clergy, Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum hopes to build “visible resistance and organized compassion” through regular, localized demonstrations by individuals who reject Trump’s actions on immigration, free speech, the environment and LGBTQ rights, to name a few.

Kleinbaum — rabbi emerita of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in Manhattan, New York’s flagship LGBTQ+ synagogue — is director of The Beacon, which since Jan. 20 has been holding weekly organizing and morale-building Zoom calls for Jews and others desperate to push back against a president they consider a despot. The Beacon’s first major action will take place on Thursday, March 20, at 7 p.m., when people are invited to gather wherever they live and hold up signs declaring “whatever we’re feeling in our souls in the face of this regime’s actions,” according to a release.

A spreadsheet offers suggestions for signs, from “I Stand With Our Immigrant Neighbors” to “Honk if You Love Ukraine” to “Trans Rights Are Human Rights.”

The Beacon wants people to share their gatherings on social media and organize WhatsApp or Signal groups for their neighborhoods. It is experimenting with more targeted actions, like organizing a letter-writing campaign in support of Dr. Margaret Carpenter, a New York physician who was indicted by the state of Louisiana for prescribing abortion pills to a Louisiana resident.

The Beacon is “trying to spread light where there’s darkness,” said Kleinbaum, who stepped down last July after leading CBST for 32 years. “We might not be able to change a particular policy, but we can show up for people who are targets or where there’s racism or violence, and we can try and spread light.”

Kleinbaum drew inspiration from Tag Meir, an Israeli project launched in 2011 that organizes interreligious visits to the victims of anti-Arab violence, as well as CBST’s own efforts at the start of the first Trump term to show solidarity with the targets of the administration’s so-called Muslim ban. 

In 2016, days after Trump was first elected, Kleinbaum and others from her synagogue visited a local mosque carrying signs reading “Jewish New Yorkers stand with our Muslim neighbors.” Members of her congregation kept up the weekly vigil until COVID hit. 

The Beacon grew out of conversations Kleinbaum had with Rabbi Sharon Brous of the independent IKAR congregation in Los Angeles and Rabbi Stephanie Kolin of Congregation Beth Elohim, a Reform synagogue in Brooklyn. “How do we strengthen each other?” Kleinbaum remembers the rabbis asking each other. “How do we insulate our souls so that we’re not crushed by this cruelty?”

Kleinbaum said she was also inspired by a trip to the Mauthausen concentration camp with her congregation in 2017, when she learned that the Nazis would tell Austrians living along the roads leading to the camp to close their blinds when a transport of Jews or political prisoners was scheduled to pass by. 

“That’s how every person living in those houses knew a transport was moving,” said Kleinbaum. “They could hear the rumbling of the trucks, but they somehow could avoid knowing what was going on. So I’m very motivated by that image to say, we can’t close the blinds.”

While three rabbis were in on its founding, The Beacon is close to formalizing a relationship with Union Theological Seminary, the liberal Christian seminary in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights. Kleinbaum is also on the board of the Interfaith Center of New York, “which is very actively a part of this as well,” she said. 

“I would call it multifaith and secular, because we want it rooted in spirituality, but not a specific religion,” she said.

Between 120 and 190 people have attended the Monday Zoom calls, and The Beacon has a database of more than 1,100 people, according to a spokesman.

Kleinbaum said she is aware that people are frustrated with the slow pace of resistance, as well as overwhelmed by the volume of executive orders and norm-breaking actions being taken by and in the name of the administration. She compared the first 30 days of Trump’s second term to shloshim, the 30 days of mourning and detachment that follows a Jewish death. 

And yet she feels that’s starting to change, and that The Beacon is part of an emerging “landscape” of resistance. She mentions the work of Indivisible, the progressive movement founded during the first Trump term, and Markers For Democracy, which organizes postcard-writing drives on behalf of progressive causes.

In the absence of large-scale demonstrations or a unified Democratic response, local and even individual protests have sprung up, like the businesses that have prepared escape routes for immigrant employees, stay-at-home strikes by agricultural workers in California and the refusals by teachers in school districts like Los Angeles to let immigration agents enter school grounds. 

The progressive group Bend the Arc: Jewish Action organizes petition drives and co-sponsors rallies, including an “emergency rally” in New York’s Foley Square on Thursday to protest the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian protest leader at Columbia University. The Interfaith Center stages weekly Multifaith Mondays: Witness to Democracy vigils at New York’s Columbus Circle; sponsors include CBST, the Jewish Theological Seminary, T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights and the Union for Reform Judaism.

A coalition of liberal groups is planning nationwide protests on Saturday, April 5, with a “Hands Off!” march planned for Washington, D.C.

Kleinbaum draws particular inspiration from Rev. Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., who at the Inaugural Prayer Service issued a direct plea to a scowling Trump to show compassion for immigrants, refugees and LGBTQ+ communities.

Kleinbaum took a cue from Budde on Jan. 30, when she attended New York Mayor Eric Adams’s annual interfaith breakfast. Kleinbaum and other clergy held up a sign reading, “Mr. Mayor, show mercy to our immigrant friends,” shortly after Adams publicly pledged his cooperation with the White House’s hardline immigration enforcement agenda.

Photographs of the clergy holding the sign made it into much of the media coverage of the event. “I also want this group to create a split screen, so when there’s cruelty, we also have an image of people doing something of compassion and kindness,” she said.

Long associated with a politically active synagogue, and married to American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, a frequent target of right-wing ire, Kleinbaum knows she is in a different place than the pulpit rabbis who try to avoid politics lest they alienate one faction or another in their institutions.

The Trump administration has also claimed that some of its most controversial actions, like the detention of Khalil and freezing $400 million in funding for Columbia, are being done in the name of fighting antisemitism.

“I really feel for people who are struggling with how to be spiritual leaders in communities that are divided,” she said. “I am also very sensitive to how difficult it is right now given this outrageous antisemitism that we’re facing.”

And still, she sees the current political stakes as “existential.” 

“There are ways to be a leader in these moments, which means not just hocking people,” she said, using a Yiddishism meaning nagging or scolding, “but trying to lead people in a way that helps provide comfort and also some leadership and vision of where we need to go.”

Handwritten signs and neighborhood demonstrations might seem a quaint response to an administration that has a Republican-led Congress behind it and that has threatened, and acted, to disregard traditional checks on presidential power such as the courts and a free press.

Kleinbaum acknowledges that reality, and foresees connecting Beacon volunteers to political action efforts as the group gathers momentum. The Beacon has held trainings about local government and is considering ways to leverage local political power. 

In its initial stage, however, The Beacon is about empowering people who feel powerless.

“We’re facing a very different scenario, and we have to kind of build our muscles so that we’ll be strong enough to be engaged politically,” she said. “We want to inflate people so that they don’t disappear and we don’t feel so crushed by the cruelty that we just want to stay in bed all day, which is a very real response.”

The tale sounded almost too heartwarming to be true: A kosher bagel store, just down the road from a few synagogues, was owned by an Arab American who had grown to be beloved by the local Jewish community.

For decades, that was the story of Nick Sammoudi and the Jews of Philadelphia’s Main Line. As a longtime employee-turned-proprietor of New York Bagel Bakery, Sammoudi, a Jordanian of Palestinian descent, was a familiar face to the Jewish denizens of the suburb of Lower Merion and its surroundings. He was the go-to caterer for Yom Kippur break-fast, Saturday afternoon luncheons and, of course, many a bris. Jewish teens from the community would work in his store.

As relations ruptured between Jews and cultural establishments nationwide after Oct. 7, 2023, the friendship between Sammoudi and his Jewish neighbors remained intact — until it all came crashing down.

Now, a group of local Jews are calling to cancel the bagel store’s kosher certification — accusing Sammoudi of celebrating the murder of Israelis and leading a “double life.” A petition to that end has garnered more than 2,000 signatures in a little over a week. Some locals are already boycotting the store they patronized for years.

And after circulating in area forums for months, the controversy is now in the national Jewish eye — spreading through pro-Israel WhatsApp and Facebook groups, where the outrage has extended far beyond the Main Line.

“It feels horrible,” said a local community member who, like several others who spoke to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about Sammoudi, asked to remain anonymous. “It feels like someone I really trusted betrayed my trust. I felt conflicted about telling anyone, because how could I ruin this person who I cared about?”

Sammoudi insists that he does not hate Jews and said he sold the bagel store months before this controversy erupted. He says no synagogue has yet boycotted the store, and he still has allies in the community — including Keystone-K, the Pennsylvania kosher certification agency, which has rebuffed calls to drop the bagel store’s certification.

But there is one thing Sammoudi shares with his critics: a feeling of betrayal. After feeding the Jewish community for more than 20 years, he said, some people he felt close to have stopped taking his calls.

“It’s sad, very sad, disappointing. I lost all these people I consider my friends,” he said in an interview. “For the last 27 years I served them, helped them, did some extra stuff for them. Really, it’s sad.”

Like so many controversies, it all began on Facebook.

On Oct. 6, 2024, the eve of the one-year anniversary of Hamas’ attack on Israel, the local community member was scrolling through Facebook and noticed that the algorithm was recommending a profile with an Arabic name. The community member and the Arabic profile had one mutual friend: Nick Sammoudi, the bagel-maker the community member had known since childhood.

The community member clicked on it — and came to believe that this profile also belonged to Sammoudi. It was under the name Nasser Irsen, which Samoudi said is his first and middle name, and at least one photo posted on it in 2017 was identical to one posted on Sammoudi’s own Facebook page. Another from two years earlier showed him posing with the employees of New York Bagel, all wearing matching yellow-and-blue T-shirts.

Since Oct. 7, 2023, many of the posts have had a different focus, showing destruction in Gaza and children there suffering. Some of the posts — in the view of the community member and other local Jews — condemn Israel or celebrate Hamas’ attack.

The day after the Hamas massacre, one post quoted the Quran, from a chapter about the ancient Israelites, who the text says had grown arrogant.

“When the first of the two warnings would come to pass, We would send against you some of Our servants of great might, who would ravage your homes,” the quote said. “This would be a warning fulfilled.”

Above the quote, he wrote, “The truth of God is great.”

Other posts condemned Palestinian leaders who have cooperated with Israelis. One says Israeli soldiers are devoid of moral values. Above the photos of Palestinian leaders with Israelis, he wrote, “Know your enemy.”

Alarmed, the community member met with a small group of people from the local Orthodox community to discuss the posts, and reached out to Keystone-K, which had a representative at the meeting. The agency monitors the store frequently to ensure it complies with kosher dietary practices.

One member of a local Orthodox synagogue who was present at the meeting, Scott Friedman, spent hours reading the Arabic Facebook posts as well as the comments below them, all in automated translation. He then said he sent the posts to a friend of his who worked for the FBI, who in turn sent them to an Arabic speaker for confirmation. He wanted to be certain about what he was seeing before pushing for action.

“I’m not saying you have to sit there and say you love the Jews, but you don’t have to post that they should be killed or kicked out of Israel,” Friedman said. “If that’s what it is, you don’t have to have a kosher bagel store… When you have something this egregious, we don’t have the benefit of saying, ‘Maybe this is OK.’”

The conversations were playing out in the midst of the fall Jewish holiday season. The initial meeting took place days before Yom Kippur, and soon afterward, Rabbi Yonah Gross, a senior official at Keystone-K, met with Sammoudi to discuss the posts.

Gross declined to comment to JTA, but he issued a statement on Nov. 8, following the meeting, that the agency was “aware of information that has recently surfaced regarding the Facebook page of an employee at New York Bagels.” The statement did not name Sammoudi or detail the concerns that prompted the statement.

“The matter has been investigated extensively, and numerous law enforcement agencies, as well as professionals with varying expertise surrounding this issue, have been consulted,” Gross’ statement said. “New York Bagels will continue to be certified kosher (Pas Yisroel) under the supervision of Keystone-K.”

At that point, those concerned by Sammoudi’s posts had decided to air their concerns in Jewish communal forums. One of them compiled a PDF with screenshots of some of the posts in translation and began to circulate it. It was titled, “Nick and Hamas,” and called the posts “troubling and horrifying,” saying they constitute “a sickening glorification of killing Jews.”

Speaking to JTA this week, Sammoudi acknowledged that the Arabic Facebook profile belonged to him, and that he used it to communicate with friends in the Middle East, which he left in 1990. Regarding the posts, he said at different times that most of them were by him, but also that he had been hacked and had not written some of them despite their appearing under his name.

He said he could not exactly recall the Oct. 8, 2023, post.

He also said that he had sold the bagel store, though he would not name the new owner or say how he knew them. He said he still comes in occasionally as an adviser.

“I know where I am, in the bagel shop in the middle of the Jewish community, and I’m not that stupid to put things like this in my Facebook,” he said regarding the posts. “If I want to do that stuff I would lock my page so nobody can go there.”

But in October 2024, around the time of his meeting with Gross, he had already begun to address the accusations publicly — on his English-language Facebook profile.

“No comment at this moment,” he wrote on Oct. 16. “Everything you heard is a lie and slander.”

Later that day, he wrote in a separate post, “Sad moments when this relationship that lasted 26 years ended.” Two weeks later, he followed up, lamenting “unfounded rumors that question our stores [sic] loyalty. We have been here for 26 years and our patriotism is 100% to America and 100% to our jewish friends.”

Less than two weeks later, on Nov. 10, he posted a lengthier explanation, disavowing the posts and saying he did not support the Oct. 7 attack.

“I would like to make it very clear that I do not stand with terrorism or the killing of innocent civilians. I am a part of both communities, it hurts to see innocent lives be taken and held hostage,” he wrote.

“I acknowledge and take accountability for my past facebook posts, however, would like to make it known that not all of the posts circulating are mine, not all of the translation is correct, and I do not stand with every post that is circulating throughout our community,” he added.

Sammoudi repeated those sentiments to JTA, calling himself a critic of the Israeli government, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority alike who desires one state in the territory now encompassing Israel and the Palestinians. He said it isn’t important to him if the state were Israeli or Palestinian.

He likewise said he wanted to keep politics out of his store, which precluded gestures like hanging an Israeli flag or posters of hostages held in Gaza.

“I condemned Oct. 7 absolutely, I told that to everyone, because I knew what’s going to happen,” he said. “It’s just going to come back at civilians and innocent people in Gaza. That’s what’s happened since Oct. 7.”

For months, the issue appeared to die down. The store kept its certification, and Keystone-K’s statement was the most significant communication from communal leaders.

It bubbled up again recently in online forums, but Jewish leaders in Lower Merion still appear keen to avoid discussing it. Five local rabbis declined to comment on the record to JTA for this story, or did not respond to requests for comment.

Communal leaders who spoke anonymously said the controversy put them in a difficult position — requiring them to address the legitimate fears and concerns of constituents who may be responding to Facebook posts they may not fully understand.

“We are in this world where it feels like if you say the wrong thing you’re going to have angry hordes at your door from one side or another, and that has become an uncomfortable and untenable place to be,” one said. “And it means you have to find the perfect moral stance on the local bagel place.”

Another, who has taken calls from dozens of constituents over the issue, brought up that Jewish organizations have a long track record of opposing the movement to boycott Israel — which makes starting a boycott in their own backyard somewhat awkward.

“I’m also mindful that for the Jewish community in this day and age to start a boycott campaign would have collateral damage either now or down the road,” the leader said. “And that doesn’t take away from the very justified anger and fear and concern of this moment. I question whether that is the most productive way to answer that question.”

Those raising awareness of the Arabic Facebook posts feel no such inhibition. They have now focused their campaign on the kosher agency and communal leaders who, they say, have acted cavalierly toward a risk to the community.

The petition, which went up on March 10, was written by Sylvan Garfunkel, a local who was unaware of the controversy until February. It accuses the Keystone-K statement of “a blatant and disingenuous whitewashing of the facts.”

“This decision is not only inexplicable but also a profound betrayal of our community’s safety and trust,” it said regarding New York Bagel’s continued certification. “Here, at our front door, was the easiest opportunity to back up our words with actions and demonstrate to the world that anyone who chooses to celebrate the murder, rape, mutilation and kidnapping of our people cannot be accepted by our community.”

The petition demands the withdrawal of the kosher certification and clearer communication about Sammoudi’s posts.

“We were shocked,” Garfunkel told JTA. “This is someone who’s been part of the Jewish community for so long and trusted, and apparently living a lie. More shocking to us was — where was the strong response from our community to this?”

Keystone-K has not responded to the petition. But if the petition sought a broader conversation, that’s what it’s getting.

The text of the petition has spread across WhatsApp group chats, a popular mode of communication among Israelis as well as Orthodox Jews. On Monday night, it was posted to the Facebook group Great Kosher Restaurant Foodies, a forum for discussion and debate over kosher cuisine with more than 120,000 members.

“Disturbing stuff coming out of Philly…. Kosher restaurant owner of NY Kosher Bagels in Philadelphia has ties to anti-zionist and anti-semetism,” wrote the group administrator, Elan Kornblum. “So in the interest of community awareness and requests of the locals, I am sharing this.”

A stream of comments ensued arguing over the posts — and whether kosher certification can be pulled over a restaranteur’s views, however disturbing. Kornblum eventually shut off comments on the post.

Friedman shares the uncertainty over whether Judaism permits withdrawing certification over Sammoudi’s views — but said he’s also wary of being deceived.

“How can it make sense to continue to give a certification for kashrus to somebody who by definition has not been trustworthy, has not been honest, who had a dual identity that he hid?” he said. “We have learned over and over that just because you think you know who someone is doesn’t mean you do.”

Sammoudi, perhaps ironically, feels the same way. He had Shabbat dinners at the homes of his customers — how could they now not trust him?

“They should know better than that,” he said. “They know who I am.”

Soon, it may matter less. He said that once he handles a health issue, he plans to leave not just the bagel shop but the United States. He’s moving back to Jordan.

In the meantime, he has continued to interact with local Jews  — in a private Facebook group for members of the Lower Merion Jewish community. On March 11, according to a screenshot shared with JTA, one group member posted a message that appeared to endorse Garfunkel’s petition but also raised questions about it.

It drew at least 16 reactions. One was from Sammoudi. He liked the post.

Ted Comet, Jewish communal activist and founder of NYC’s annual Israel parade, died on Wednesday at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 100.

The cause was cancer, according to his daughter, Diane Richler, who was by his side.

Over his 75-year career, Comet held leading roles in Jewish communal organizations such as the Joint Distribution Committee, American Zionist Youth Foundation and the Council of Jewish Federations. He was considered “the widely-recognized dean of Jewish communal professional life,” according to John Ruskay, the executive vice-president emeritus of UJA-Federation of New York.

“He was a treasure,” added Ruskay, who was a friend and colleague of Comet’s for 60 years.

Rabbi Yosie Levine, the spiritual leader of the Jewish Center, a Modern Orthodox synagogue on the Upper West Side, where Comet had been a member since 1968, counted Comet as a friend as well as a congregant.

“Ted was a one-in-a-million kind of person,” Levine said. “You could learn more about life in an hour with Ted than you could reading a hundred great books. Knowing him was one of the great blessings of my life.”

Comet was the co-founder, in 1965, of New York’s Salute to Israel Parade, now named the Celebrate Israel Parade, which each spring draws tens of thousands of marchers and spectators as it winds up Fifth Avenue. In the 1960s, he helped organize some of the first large demonstrations in support of Soviet Jewry. He is also a founder of the annual Israel Folk Dance Festival, whose 73rd iteration will take place Sunday, March 30 in Manhattan.

Born in 1924 in Cleveland, Comet was the youngest of seven children. His father was a shochet, or ritual slaughterer, who died when Comet was 11 years old. Comet moved to New York for his final year of high school to study at the Talmudical Academy, what is now known as Marsha Stern Talmudical Academy/Yeshiva University High School for Boys, a Modern Orthodox Jewish day school and yeshiva located in the Washington Heights neighborhood. It is affiliated with Yeshiva University.

In 1946, when Comet was a 22 and finishing his studies towards the chaplaincy at Yeshiva University, he volunteered as a counselor in a Jewish orphans’ home in Versailles, France. The children were survivors of Auschwitz, and the experience changed the trajectory of his life.

It was there that he met and befriended a shy, 18-year-old teenager named Elie Wiesel —  a relationship that lasted until Wiesel’s death in 2016. In the summer following his arrival in France, Comet went to the Pyrenees to establish a summer camp for the young survivors.

“It changed my life in two ways,” Comet said in an interview with the New York Jewish Week last spring on the occasion of his 100th birthday. “One was that I didn’t know the horrors of the Holocaust [until then], on the downside. On the upside, I was stunned by the ability of these orphans to respond to love, to care and to concern. I realized you can make a difference.”

Those realizations inspired him to pursue a career dedicated to the Jewish people, and to fostering a relationship between Jews and Israel.

Comet returned to the United States in 1947, received a master’s degree in social work from Yeshiva University and was hired as the director of the Brooklyn Zionist Youth Foundation, an affiliate of the Zionist youth group Young Judaea. Following that, he became the director of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He then held leadership positions at the American Zionist Youth Foundation, Council of Jewish Federations, the Joint Distribution Committee and the World Council of Jewish Communal Service.

In 1951, Comet met Shoshana Ungar, a Holocaust survivor from Belgium. They married a year later, and had two children —  a son, Joel, who lives in Jerusalem, and his daughter, Diane, from Newton, Massachusetts, who survive him. Comet is also survived by six grandchildren, 12 great-grandchildren and two great-great grandchildren.

“He continued to find meaning in life until the very end,” daughter Richler told the New York Jewish Week about her father. “He kept his sense of humor and his awareness and his ability to have meaningful conversations with people.”

In the late 1960s, when Shoshana was in her 40s, she learned to weave. She created five, six-foot tall tapestries that tell the story of the trauma she endured as a teenager fleeing Belgium during World War II and in the years beyond. Once she completed those tapestries, she put her loom aside to never weave again. She then returned to school and trained as a psychotherapist, eventually working with Holocaust survivors and their families.

Following Shoshana’s death in 2012, Comet devoted much of his time to conducting tours of her tapestries, and sharing her theories about the transmutation of trauma as well as spreading her message of hope and resilience.

“Everybody has trauma,” Comet said. “Trauma is built into the human condition. The challenge for everybody is do we let it master us or do we master trauma. That was Shoshana’s major point.”

Comet’s hope was that the trauma of Oct. 7, 2023, when Israel was attacked by Hamas, could “be transmuted into some positive change in Israel.”

“The whole notion of transmuting pain into purpose is so reflective of his life and his values,” said Eric Goldstein, CEO of UJA-Federation of New York. “Ted was a Jewish communal giant who inspired literally generations of people to engage communally. Even in the most recent years I see him speak with the same vigor and enthusiasm about Jewish communal life. And inspire people of all ages and stages to get more involved.”

Several days before his passing, this reporter visited Comet. At the time, the burning issue that he was trying to solve was, “What will I do with the rest of my shortened life? All of a sudden it became urgent and I have come up with all kinds of ideas.”

“The big issue is what do we leave behind? The answer is our life has to have meaning and purpose,” he said. “I would like Jews to feel that we are part of something and we all have roles to play in the creative continuity of the Jewish people.”

Prior to his death, Comet was focused on what to do with his wife’s tapestries after he was gone — his hope was that they would be used as pedagogic tools.

Goldstein said on Wednesday that, according to Comet’s wishes, he expects the tapestries will be displayed at UJA-Federation’s headquarters at 130 East 59th St.

“Shoshana is dead for 12 years and her message [of the transmutative power of trauma] is still impacting me,” Comet said. “Isn’t that something wondrous? The sense of wonder, there is so much around us that is wondrous if we just let it be recognized.”

The funeral will take place Wednesday afternoon at The Jewish Center at 131 West 86th St.

Former hostages, including some released in recent weeks, were among the tens of thousands of Israelis who took to the streets on Tuesday to protest Israel’s resumption of fighting in Gaza.

“Israel’s decision to return to fighting brings me back to Gaza, to the moments where I heard the sounds of explosions around me and where I feared for my life as I was afraid that the tunnel where I was being held would collapse,” Yarden Bibas said in a social media post ahead of the rally where he appeared in Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square, holding signs showing the faces of his best friends, David and Ariel Cunio, who remain in captivity.

“My wife and children were kidnapped alive and were brutally murdered in captivity,” Bibas continued. “The military pressure endangers the hostages while an agreement brings them home.”

Noa Argamani, who was rescued by Israeli troops last summer and who did not appear at the rally, also decried the return to fighting in a social media post.

“Two words, and so many emotions inside. Suddenly, out of the silence, all hopes explode in an instant. Two words, but for the hostages inside, they mean explosions and noises that bring back the fear of dying,” she wrote.

To her partner Avinatan Or, who is one of an estimated two dozen hostages who remain alive, she said, “I’m sorry, Avinatan. I’m sorry that for 529 days, you haven’t seen daylight. I’m sorry that you were left behind.”

The posts and protests came after Israeli leaders resumed fighting in Gaza after a two-month ceasefire. They said Hamas had refused to accept their parameters for continuing the pause.

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said any further negotiations would happen “under fire,” suggesting that Israel does not plan to pause fighting again. He also thanked U.S. President Donald Trump for what he said was Trump’s backing for the return to fighting. Trump had put pressure on both Israel and Hamas to agree to the ceasefire deal that began in January, in which 33 hostages, mostly living, were freed.

Netanyahu is facing steep criticism from many Israelis who see his choice to resume fighting as timed to be personally advantageous. The resumption came as he was expected in court for proceedings related to his corruption trial, and as he faced a mass protest — which continued in Jerusalem — against his move to fire the head of Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence service.

The return to war also allowed Netanyahu to shore up his governing coalition. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right politician who heads the Otzma Yehudit party, had exited the government to protest the ceasefire. He has now rejoined.

A medieval manuscript, believed to be the oldest Jewish book in the world, is now on view in New York City.

The Afghan Liturgical Quire, which dates to approximately the year 700 CE, is on display at the Jewish Theological Seminary Library in Morningside Heights as part of an exhibit, “Sacred Words: Revealing the Earliest Hebrew Book” that opens Wednesday and runs until July 17.

Also known as the Afghan Siddur, the diminutive prayer book measures five inches by five inches and “is comprised of prayers, poems, and pages of the oldest discovered Passover Haggadah, which was mysteriously written upside down,” according to a JTS press release.

The tome was previously on view at the the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., which said the book is relic of an 8th-century civilization along the Silk Road, the ancient trading route, and was created by Jews who lived among the Buddhists who ruled the Bamiyan Valley in modern-day Afghanistan.

A member of Afghanistan’s Hazara ethnic minority discovered the manuscript in 1997, in a cave near one of the ancient Bamiyan Buddha monuments that were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, as JTA reported.

The book went on a roundabout global journey to eventually reach the Green family, evangelical Christians based in Oklahoma who own the Hobby Lobby chain. The family purchased the book without knowing its actual age or origin, and added it to a collection that would evolve into The Museum of the Bible.

The book was mislabeled “Egypt, circa 900 CE,” until carbon testing in 2019 confirmed that the siddur was even older, “astonishing researchers at the museum,” JTA reported in November 2024.

“Far more ancient written Hebrew texts had been discovered, but only on scrolls, most famously the roughly 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls that are displayed prominently in Israel,” according to JTA. “The carbon dating indicated that this was the earliest intact Hebrew codex by more than a century.”

The JTS exhibition was developed in partnership with The Museum of the Bible and in cooperation with the Afghan Jewish Foundation, the American Sephardi Federation and Congregation Anshei Shalom of Jamaica Estates, Queens.

“The Afghan Liturgical Quire offers an extraordinary opportunity to discover a volume of Jewish prayers that predates any known Siddur, revealing a rich liturgical tradition that extends back well over a millennium,” JTS’s curator of Jewish art, Sharon Liberman Mintz, said in a statement. “I am delighted to present this remarkable treasure at JTS and invite the public to engage with this unique and historic artifact of Jewish heritage.”

The exhibit will be open to the public on Mondays through Thursdays from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.