(New York Jewish Week) – Two women have been charged with hate crimes after allegedly attacking a passerby who confronted them while they were tearing down posters of Israeli hostages held in Gaza.

The two suspects, Mehwish Omer and Stephanie Gonzalez, were removing the hostage posters from a street light on the Upper West Side shortly before 10 p.m. on Nov. 9. A 41-year-old woman approached the two women, argued with them and recorded them on her cell phone, police said.

Omer and Gonzalez allegedly physically assaulted the woman, ripping a Star of David necklace off her neck and knocking her phone onto the ground, damaging the device.

The two women fled the scene, leaving the victim with minor injuries to her face and neck. The NYPD’s hate crimes task force investigated the incident.

Omer, a 26-year-old resident of the Upper West Side, was charged with assault as a hate crime and criminal mischief as a hate crime on Monday, police said.

Gonzalez, a 25-year-old from Yonkers, was charged on Nov. 20 with attempted robbery and assault as a hate crime.

🚨WANTED🚨for a Hate Crime Assault at the corner of Riverside Drive and West 82 Street #UPPERWESTSIDE #manhattan On 11/09/23 @ 9:55 PM Reward up to $3500 Seen them? Know who they are? Call 1-800-577-TIPS or DM us! Calls are CONFIDENTIAL! #yourcityyourcall pic.twitter.com/Wv0mFphN74

— NYPD Crime Stoppers (@NYPDTips) November 10, 2023

The war between Israel and Hamas has led to repeated disputes on New York City streets, mostly verbal. New York City has seen a surge in antisemitic hate crimes since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking around 240 hostage.

The posters bearing the photos and names of civilians taken hostage by the Gaza terror group, which pro-Israel advocates have spread around the city and elsewhere worldwide, have become a flashpoint, with anti-Israel activists regularly tearing down or defacing the fliers, sparking disputes with passersby.

Last month, a 19-year-old was charged with hate crimes after attacking an Israeli on the Columbia University campus during a dispute over the posters outside the university library.

Other people have lost jobs or faced other repercussions after footage of them tearing down the posters circulated online.

More than 50 Israeli hostages, almost all women and children, have been freed in recent days in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held on security offenses and a pause in the fighting between the two sides.

(JTA) — For his first trip abroad since being elected president of Argentina last week, Javier Milei picked an auspicious destination: the tomb of the Lubavitcher rebbe in Queens, New York.

The site is a frequent pilgrimage location for Jews and others who believe there is special spiritual significance to prayers made at the burial place of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the last leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement.

Milei is Catholic, but his admiration for and engagement with Judaism runs deep. He studies with a rabbi in Buenos Aires, has quoted Torah passages in rallies and walked out on stage for a campaign event to a recording of a shofar. He has said he wishes to convert to Judaism but does not see Shabbat observance as compatible with running his country.

He last visited the rabbi’s grave, known as the Ohel, in July during his campaign.

“I am going to be thankful because when I last visited this place, I asked for courage, wisdom and temperance: wisdom to separate good from bad, courage to choose good, temperance to maintain myself in the position I have,” Milei told the TV news channel LaNacion on Sunday night.

“Also to accept the will of the Creator,” he added. “The Creator put me in a place of maximum responsibility so I am going to thank and try to be up to the task.”

The trip to the grave was Milei’s second Jewish event since the far-right “anarcho-capitalist” was elected in a runoff Nov. 19. On Saturday night, he participated in a havdalah ceremony to mark the end of Shabbat in Once, a Jewish neighborhood of Buenos Aires, where he received blessings from the Kabbalistic rabbi David Hanania Pinto.

For his trip to New York, Milei traveled with a few members of his future cabinet, as well as Marc Stanley, the U.S. ambassador to Argentina, and Gerardo Werthein, an Argentinean Jewish businessman who is rumored to be in the running to become Argentina’s ambassador in Washington, D.C.

Another Argentinean Jewish businessman accompanied him to the rabbi’s grave. Eduardo Elsztain is chairman and chief executive of IRSA, Argentina’s largest real estate company, which manages the largest shopping malls in Buenos Aires. Elsztain, who was a protege of the Jewish financier George Soros, has also supported Chabad social programs and Jewish youth-related projects in Argentina.

Milei is scheduled to be inaugurated Dec. 10. He has said he wants his first international trip as president to be to Israel, where he has vowed to move Argentina’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

(JTA) — When Stars of David began appearing on Jewish homes and institutions in Paris’ 10th arrondissement late last month, as well as on a Jewish woman’s home in Berlin, many were quick to bring up comparisons to the Nazi era.

But French authorities pointed to a surprising culprit: Russia.

According to French authorities, the pictures of the Stars of David first began to spread via a Russian-run news site called Recent Reliable News (RRN) before being found by others online. Shortly after the incident went viral, VIGINUM, France’s intelligence unit devoted to tracking foreign digital interference, recorded more than 1,000 bots making over 2,500 posts related to the incident on X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter.

RRN, seemingly a news aggregator, was revealed in June to be part of a network of web domains used by Russian hackers for a disinformation operation targeted at Western Europe known as “Doppelganger.” RRN and sites like it were used to mimic major news outlets and even government sites, sharing information with a clearly pro-Russia slant.

“VIGINUM has a high degree of confidence that these bots are affiliated to the RRN network, given that one of their main activities consists in redirecting people to RRN websites,” France’s foreign ministry said in a press release earlier this month. “France strongly condemns the involvement of the Russian network Recent Reliable News (RRN/Doppelgänger) in the artificial spreading and initial distribution on social media of photos of graffiti representing Stars of David in the 10th arrondissement of Paris.”

As antisemitism has spiked in Europe in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war, multiple investigations have pointed to Russian involvement in stoking an already tense situation. While motives remain unclear, experts have noted that fomenting already brewing divisions and chaos in the West has been a tradition of Russia’s security services since the Cold War.

French investigators noted that their probe is ongoing, and they still have yet to confirm if the vandalism was the work of Russian state-backed actors. But they revealed that two suspects arrested in connection with the graffiti were Moldovan nationals who allegedly painted the stars on the orders of an unknown individual whom they communicated with by phone in Russian. (While Moldova’s national language is Romanian, like many other former Soviet republics, Russian has remained a first language for many of its citizens.)

As more details about the vandalism emerged, more questions were raised. For one, not all of the stars were sprayed on Jewish buildings. Second, the style of the stars — from an elegant stencil, in a deep blue color reminiscent of the Israeli flag — seemed out of place for an antisemitic incident.

While the details remain murky, Nina Jankowicz, the U.S vice president of the Centre for Information Resilience and an expert on disinformation, said the episode tracks with Russia’s modus operandi.

“This definitely seems like it could fit the bill of the types of provocation that Russia has been known to be behind in the past,” Jankowicz told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Russia uses these pre-existing fissures in society to drive further polarization or drive issues that are hot button issues in society, generally, without regard for, for the context.”

Such moves have been part and parcel of Russia’s foreign policy for decades and a key feature of its so-called “hybrid war” since its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

“Driving polarization in Western societies is really an easy way to have wins for Russia,” Jankowicz said.

That hasn’t been restricted to amplifying divisive topics in the digital sphere. During the 2016 U.S. elections, dueling protests unfolded on the streets of Houston, Texas, both for and against a local Islamic center. What neither side fully knew at the time was that both protests were spawned by Facebook groups made by operatives in Moscow.

“I think we’d like to think that at this point, Russia is just doing stuff on the internet and then poisoning dissidents every so often. But these sorts of on-the-ground operations — which sometimes aren’t carried out in the most perfect way — are 100% the sort of thing that they’ve done in the past, and that they continue to do even after the U.S. election in 2016,” Jankowicz said.

Jankowicz noted that Russia is an equal opportunity inciter, switching from causes on the right to left at will, and the country is no stranger to using antisemitism as a weapon. In fact, it’s a trick cribbed straight from the Soviet Union playbook.

“During the Soviet period, especially in places like Germany, Russia, would very deliberately deface memorials and use antisemitic attacks, as late as the 80s, in order to stoke the specter of antisemitism,” she said.

In the late 1980s, before German reunification, Rainer Sonntag, the leader of West Germany’s most influential Neo-Nazi group, was doing double duty as a spy for both the East German Stasi and Soviet KGB. During the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the Stasi forged hundreds of letters of support from “veterans of the Waffen-SS” in an attempt to embarrass West Germany.

“They have been on both sides of issues like civil and human rights issues related to the Black population in the United States, LGBT rights, and all sorts of things. So it’s not beyond them to play both sides,” Jankowicz said.

Russia has leveled the same charges at the West, most commonly at Ukraine and the United States. Last month, Moscow claimed U.S.-backed forces instigated the mob that stormed Makhachkala airport looking for Jews in Dagestan, Russia.

“The events in Makhachkala last night were inspired also through social networks, not least from the territory of Ukraine, by the hands of agents of Western special services,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said at the time.

“This is something we’ve noted previously in a variety of online influence campaigns — more of a ‘muddying of the waters’ than a clear ‘trying to do X’ type operation,” said Justin Crow, a researcher at the University of Sussex who focuses on Russia and open source intelligence. “Almost always around highly sensitive contemporaneous cultural issues — i.e. exploiting circumstantial events to sow discord, without that discord needing to be specifically targeted at one group or another.”

Russia isn’t the only country deploying the strategy and involving Jewish institutions. Two weeks ago, a fire was set outside of a synagogue in Armenia’s capital, Yerevan. The building was only lightly damaged, but Armenian authorities were quick to open an investigation, claiming that the arson was committed by a foreign national who was only in the country for a few hours.

Like the situation in France, news of the attack was most widely spread by media connected to an opposing nation: Azerbaijan, which has been at war with Armenia over the disputed region known as Nagorno-Karabakh to Azeris and Artsakh to Armenians.

Azerbaijani media has reported that the attack, as well as a vandalism of the same synagogue in early October — just before the start of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7 — had been claimed by ASALA, an Armenian Marxist-Leninist group that had fought with Turkey in the 1970s and 80s but has largely been considered inactive since 1991.

“We didn’t know what had happened yet, and Azerbaijani channels were already circulating photos of the building,” said Rima Varzhapetyan, the head of Armenia’s Jewish community, according to the Times of Israel. “Obviously, there are some forces that work not against us Jews, but against Armenia. This is outrageous.”

(JTA) — Hamas released 11 Israeli hostages, the last of four groups it agreed to free last week and an indication of how difficult it may be for Israel to secure the freedom of the rest of the hostages held by terror groups in Gaza.

Hamas has so far freed 51 Israeli hostages, nearly all of them women and children. The 11 hostages released on Monday belong to five separate families, each of which is returning to Israel without their husband or father. All five men are still being held hostage in Gaza. along with more than 150 other Israelis who were taken captive in Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

Israel agreed to a temporary ceasefire that began on Friday to secure the hostages’ release, and on Monday, the Biden administration announced that the truce would last at least another two days, which means that Hamas has agreed to free another 20 Israeli women and children. But there is no agreement yet on when men will be released, and Israel has vowed to resume its war in Gaza after the truce ends, with the aim of deposing Hamas.

In addition to the ceasefire, Israel has agreed to release three Palestinian prisoners — also women and minors — in exchange for each hostage. Israel has also increased the entrance of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip as a condition of the deal with Hamas.

President Joe Biden, who has resisted calls to pressure Israel into a longterm ceasefire, said he wants more time to ensure humanitarian aid reaches civilians in Gaza.

“The United States has led the humanitarian response into Gaza—building on years of work as the largest funder of humanitarian assistance for the Palestinian people,” he said Monday in a statement. “We are taking full advantage of the pause in fighting to increase the amount of humanitarian aid moving into Gaza, and we will continue our efforts to build a future of peace and dignity for the Palestinian people.”

The 11 hostages released Monday were from Nir Oz, a kibbutz that was among the communities hardest hit in the Oct. 7 attack. They include:

• Sharon Cunio, 34, and her twin 3-year-old daughters, Emma and Yuli. Their father, David, 34, remains among the hostages. Sharon’s sister, Danielle Aloni, and Danielle’s 5-year-old daughter, Emilia, were also abducted; they were among the hostages released on Friday.
• Sahar Kalderon, 16, and her brother, Erez, 12. Both are dual French-Israeli citizens. Their father, Ofer, remains a hostage. They are the grandchildren of Carmela Dan, who was murdered with her autistic grandaughter Noya — a cousin to Sahar and Erez.
• Or Yaakov, 16, and his brother Yagil, 13. Their father, Yair, 59, remains a hostage along with his girlfriend, Meirav Tal, 54.
• Karina Engel, 53, and her daughters Mika, 18, and Yuval, 11. Their father, Ronen, 54, remains a hostage.
• Eitan Yahalomi, 12, was released. His father, Ohad, remains a hostage and is believed to have been wounded in a shootout with terrorists.

(JTA) — In 1951, the writer Herbert Gold published “The Heart of an Artichoke,” a widely admired autobiographical story about his immigrant Jewish father and the grocery store he ran in a suburb of Cleveland.

When the story was left out of the 1963 anthology “Great Jewish Short Stories,” he complained to the volume’s editor, his friend and future Nobelist Saul Bellow.

“I said, Saul, you told me how much you loved ‘The Heart of the Artichoke,’” Gold recalled in a 2018 interview with the Paris Review. “But then he just said, I forgot.”

Gold, a prolific, San Francisco-based novelist and poet who died Nov. 19 at age 99, never enjoyed the commercial success or name recognition of other post-war Jewish writers, including Bellow, Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, but earned critical acclaim for books that, among others things, explored Jewish-American identity through the lens of his own experience. They included the 1967 bestseller “Fathers” — a “memoir as fiction” about growing up in Cleveland — and a sequel, “Family,” published in 1981. His 1972 book “My Last Two Thousand Years” describes a trip to Israel, where the writer rediscovers his Jewish heritage.

As a journalist, he covered Israel’s 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War for publications as diverse as Playboy and the Wall Street Journal.

In a essay he wrote in 1961, “Death in Miami Beach,” he contemplated his own mortality on a series of visits to what he described as a haven for “exiled Cubans, local hot-rodders and their gum-chewing molls, sportsmen, natty invalids in gabardine, drunks, stockbrokers, antique collectors, semites and anti-semites all taking the air together on Lincoln Road.” Admirers of the essay included Vladimir Nabokov, who chose Gold to succeed him as a lecturer on Russian literature at Cornell University.

“Herbert Gold’s particular strength as a writer is the intimacy of detail that he establishes between himself and the reader,” a reviewer, the novelist Jerome Charyn, wrote in 1981. “At its best, his language sways with a litany of song, and his characters have a special kind of vulnerability. He writes about growing old in America and the ritual of falling out of love.”

Gold was born in the Lakewood suburb of Cleveland, where his father Samuel, an immigrant from Ukraine, ran a fruit store and later a grocery store. Growing up, Gold told the Paris Review, “I felt a lot of antisemitism. But being the only Jew in the school had advantages, because sex was forbidden. Sex was work of the devil, and Jews were the work of the devil. So girls liked me. I was popular in a funny way.”

He enlisted in the Army during World War II, serving stateside, and later earned a degree at Columbia University. There he became friends with the poet Allen Ginsberg, who introduced Gold to his circle of Beat writers.

Gold also studied at the Sorbonne in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship, where his friends and acquaintances included Bellow and the African-American writers Richard Wright and James Baldwin. The first of his 30 books, “Birth of a Hero,” was published with Bellow’s help by Viking in 1951.

Gold was married and divorced twice. He is survived by four children, six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

A fixture in San Francisco, where he moved in 1960 to write and teach, Gold was active well into his 90s: An anthology, “Best American Poetry of 2023,” includes one of his poems. According to his website, a new book, “Father Verses Sons,” is scheduled for March 2024.

In 2021, he was interviewed by J., the Jewish weekly serving the Bay Area. “I’m very preoccupied with the fact that I’m not going to live forever,” he said. Death “is inevitable and I have to accept it. I’m comforted by the fact that a few people, my children, will remember me or will inherit something from me, and I will be immortal in that sense.”

(JTA) — Israel reprimanded Spain and Belgium’s ambassadors in Tel Aviv after their country’s prime ministers called Israel’s actions in Gaza “unacceptable” on Friday.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo made their comments at a press conference at the Rafah border crossing in Egypt, which has been the corridor that Hamas’ Israeli hostages have been delivered through and that humanitarian aid has arrived in since Oct. 7. Their press conference took place just a short time before the first set of Israeli hostages were due to make their way through the crossing as part of a ceasefire deal.

Sánchez, who is facing pressure from left-wing parties as he has struggled since July elections to form a government coalition, said Israel’s “indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians, including thousands of children, is completely unacceptable.” He also said Spain is open to recognizing a Palestinian state, even “if the European Union does not.”

De Croo, who has been a member of the conservative Open VLD party, said Israel’s offensive in Gaza in response to Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7 has not followed “international humanitarian law.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the two, saying in a statement that they “did not place total responsibility on Hamas for the crimes against humanity it perpetrated: massacring Israeli citizens and using Palestinians as human shields.” Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said their statements were in “support of terrorism.”

Both Sánchez and De Croo had condemned Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks, but in the nearly two months since have focused more on calling for a ceasefire in the ongoing war in Gaza. Israel views a ceasefire as unacceptable because it would leave Hamas in power, though it agreed to a short truce to allow for the release of more than 50 hostages, mostly women and children.

After Spain’s ambassador was summoned for a reprimand, Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares summoned Israel’s ambassador to Spain, AFP reported.

Multiple Spanish politicians have called on Sánchez to completely cut ties with Israel.

(JTA) – Jewish congregations, politicians and campus groups in the Vermont area and beyond condemned Saturday’s shooting of three Palestinian college students in Burlington, an incident authorities are investigating as a possible hate crime.

A 48-year-old Burlington man has been arrested in connection with the shooting of the students, whose names are Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ahmed.

At least three area rabbis and four different Hillels were among the voices expressing shock and sadness over the shooting, the latest outbreak of violence in the United States connected to the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish, called the violence “shocking and deeply upsetting,” adding, “Hate has no place here, or anywhere.”

“We denounce this horrendous violence in our community. And we denounce any hatred that could lead to an act like this,” the three local rabbis wrote on social media. 

“As Jews, we are keenly aware of the impact of violence on minority religious communities, and so we stand in solidarity with our Muslim brothers and sisters at this frightening time,” wrote the rabbis — David Edleson of Temple Sinai, Aaron Philmus of Ohavi Zedek Synagogue and Jan Salzman of Congregation Ruach haMaqom. They added that they had reached out to the local Islamic center president to offer their support.

The students who were shot all graduated from Ramallah Friends School, a Quaker-affiliated private school in the Palestinian West Bank city, according to the school. They attend Brown University in Rhode Island, Haverford College in Pennsylvania and Trinity College in Connecticut. 

Two of the students were wearing keffiyehs, traditional Palestinian headscarves, at the time of the shooting, according to local police, and a spokesperson for the families told The New York Times that the men were speaking a mixture of Arabic and English at the time of the attack. 

Authorities arrested a suspect, Jason Eaton, on Sunday night and arraigned him on Monday. Eaton, a 48-year-old white Burlington resident, pleaded not guilty to three attempted murder charges for shooting and wounding the men with a handgun, and was ordered held without bail. The Daily Beast, speaking with Eaton’s mother, reported that he works in finance, often reads the Bible and did not discuss the Israel-Hamas conflict during Thanksgiving dinner. Police said Eaton shot at the men without speaking with them, then fled the scene. He pleaded not guilty during an arraignment Monday morning.

Two of the victims are in stable condition while a third has “much more serious injuries,” Burlington police said in a statement. The three men are all 20 years old and were visiting one of the victim’s relatives for the Thanksgiving holiday. Awartani, the Brown student, regularly visited his grandmother and uncle who live in Burlington, according to an NBC News report. 

“In this charged moment, no one can look at this incident and not suspect that it may have been a hate-motivated crime,” Burlington police chief Jon Murad said in a statement about the investigation. The U.S. Justice Department’s Vermont district attorney also said that a federal investigation would be opened “to determine whether a federal crime may have been committed.”

The shooting was the most recent major act of violence committed against Palestinians and Jews in the United States since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel. One week following the attack, a 6-year-old Palestinian-American boy was murdered in Illinois in what authorities say was a hate crime. Earlier this month, a Jewish man in Los Angeles died following a physical altercation at dueling pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel protests in Los Angeles; a suspect has been arrested and charged with involuntary manslaughter. 

Jews have also been assaulted at Columbia University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Police have insisted that in the case of another prominent incident, the murder of a Detroit synagogue president, there is no evidence of a hate crime even as the murder remains unsolved and authorities are offering a $15,000 reward for information in the case.

Along with Sanders, Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger and Vermont Rep. Becca Balint, who are also progressive Jews, condemned the shooting in separate statements. 

“The City of Burlington has zero tolerance for hate crimes and will work relentlessly to bring the shooter to justice,” Weinberger said in a joint statement with Burlington police. Balint, who recently became one of a small number of Jewish members of Congress to publicly endorse a ceasefire in Gaza, said in a statement that she was “horrified by this violence” and added, “I expect there to be a full investigation into evidence of any hate crime.” 

Vermonters for Justice in Palestine, a Burlington-based pro-Palestinian activist group, held a vigil for the injured students Sunday evening. Around 200 people showed up, including members of the Jewish anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace and area chapters of the campus group Students for Justice in Palestine, according to local reports.

The presidents of the three colleges where the victims are enrolled condemned the attacks on their students. 

“I know that this heinous and despicable act of violence — this latest evidence of anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian discrimination and hate spiraling across this country and around the world — will leave many in our community deeply shaken,” Brown President Christina Paxson wrote. She identified the college’s injured student as Awartani and said a campus vigil would be held Monday. 

The executive director of Brown RISD Hillel, which oversees Jewish life at Brown, wrote in an email to students late Monday, “We strongly condemn these shootings and any act of hate or violence directed toward members of our community.” Adding that anonymous messages on campus had started to spread antisemitism in the wake of the shooting, Rabbi Josh Bolton called on the community to “lower the temperature” and asserted, “Our Jewish community on College Hill is diverse and everyone has their politics—but BRH’s support for Israel and Zionist students is unassailable.”

Greater Philly Hillel Network, which oversees the Jewish student union at Haverford College, wrote on Facebook that it was “devastated” to learn of the shooting. Trinity College Hillel also condemned the attack and said it was “saddened and disturbed.” The Hilel that serves Brown University has not made any public comments about the incident.

Although none of the victims are students there, the University of Vermont’s Hillel also condemned the attack in a statement, decrying “any act of hate or violence toward college students based on their race, religion, ethnicity, or belief.” UVM, which is located in Burlington, has been a particular flashpoint for rising tensions between Jewish and Arab groups for years, and has seen a heightened atmosphere since the outbreak of war in the region.

NEW YORK — Ilan Abecassis of Sderot is still reeling from the events of Oct. 7.

That morning, he watched from the window of his home as terrorists in pickup trucks overran his city, gunning down Israelis in the streets and in their homes.

In the ensuing days, he and almost all of Sderot’s other residents were evacuated. Abecassis, along with many others, was sent to Israel’s southern resort city of Eilat.

A teacher and vice principal at the AMIT high school in Sderot, Abecassis barely took a breath before swinging into action. With the help of the AMIT organization, an educational network of nearly 100 schools, youth villages, surrogate family residences and other programs in some 30 Israeli cities, Abecassis moved quickly to lead an alternative school in Eilat for evacuated children.

Following the trauma of Oct. 7, the focus has been largely on evacuees’ emotional, social and mental health.

“Throughout all of this, AMIT has been covering our physical and emotional needs,” Abecassis said. “Principals, teachers, management teams all left their families to come and offer us their support.” 

Abecassis spoke at AMIT’s 2023 National Event in New York on Nov. 20 to recognize the donors who support AMIT’s network of religious Jewish educational institutions. Incorporating academic and technological studies, AMIT institutions have a special focus on children from underprivileged backgrounds and from Israel’s peripheral areas.

“Ninety-nine percent of the aid we received came directly from AMIT,” Abecassis noted in his remarks. “A significant portion of this was thanks to your generous donations.”

AMIT’s Evening of Solidarity with the Children of Israel took place at Manhattan’s Sony Hall and attracted about 250 of AMIT’s major donors and national leaders as well as notable figures such as Gilan Erdan, Israel’s permanent representative to the United Nations.

Idina Menzel, the Tony Award-winning Jewish actress and singer famous for being the voice of Elsa in Disney’s “Frozen,” was one of several artists and musicians who performed at the event. She sang a rousing rendition of the song “Tree of Life,” written to commemorate the victims of the October 2018 Tree of Live synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh. Violinist Adda Kridler and pianist Cynthia Meng opened the evening with a musical tribute to AMIT’s founder, Batya Bessie Gottsfeld. Michael Harpaz, the Israeli singer, actor and dancer, emceed the evening.

The high school in Sderot is far from the only AMIT institution directly affected by the tragedy of Oct. 7. All nine public schools in Sderot are under the aegis of AMIT. In the wake of Hamas’s attacks, about 4,300 students at those schools were evacuated — mostly to Eilat and the Dead Sea and with smaller numbers in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. In addition to the significant regular funds AMIT raises via its annual campaign, since the war began AMIT has generated over $1.5 million in additional funding just for the children of Sderot. It’s being used to fund trauma therapy and a variety of other services to help evacuees from the city.

With over 40,000 students in various schools and institutions around Israel, AMIT is an integral part of Israeli society. Hostage Noa Argamani, the 25-year-old woman who was seen being taken by Hamas terrorists on a motorcycle while being kidnapped at the Nova rave party near Re’im that morning, is a graduate of the AMIT Wasserman High School in Beersheva. 

The Nov. 20 event, which had been scheduled before the war, turned into an opportunity for AMIT donors to express support for the people of Israel – and for each other – in this difficult time.

“This event is to honor all those people who have already made investments in Israel,” AMIT President Shari Safra said. “Although the tone is a little more subdued, the substance of the program is still just as relevant.”

Andy Goldsmith, AMIT’s executive vice president, said the evening reflected the seriousness of the crisis in Israel “while providing the opportunity to join together and recognize those who have distinguished themselves with their extraordinary commitment.”

Among those recognized at the event: Joyce and Daniel Straus of Englewood, New Jersey, who officially named the $70 million Gabel & Straus Campus at Kfar Batya; Ellen Spitzer-Kronitz and Emanuel Kronitz, for their support of Tiferet Gur Aryeh Junior College; and Shawna Goodman of the Morris & Rosalind Goodman Family Foundation, for supporting the AMIT Summer Camp program.

In a particularly emotional exchange, Goldsmith presented Joyce and Daniel Straus with a Torah scroll written in Poland more than 100 years ago — “rescued from the ashes of Europe and fully restored to its original glory, much like the Jewish people,” Goldsmith said.

“Joyce and Daniel, you epitomize the finest qualities of the American Jewish community. When the news from Israel is good, you celebrate with pride in her accomplishments and victories,” Goldsmith said. “And when the news is bad or, as now, laced with tragedy, you feel it with every fiber of your being and are moved to respond—in tefila [prayer], in protest, and in action.”

The Kfar Batya campus is a 10-acre educational site under construction in the central Israeli city of Ra’anana that is designed to incubate ideas and level the playing field for children from Israel’s social and geographic periphery. The campus’s name recognizes Stefanie and Jack Gabel, the parents of Joyce Straus, and Gwendolyn and Joseph Straus, parents of Daniel Straus. Its naming represents the largest donation in AMIT’s 98-year history. The campaign to fund the brand-new campus is still underway.

“We wanted to give this gift in honor and memory of our parents, to benefit AMIT and the state of Israel,” said Joyce Straus. “We hope that this will inspire others with the ability to give, to make a significant investment in AMIT and Israel’s future.”

The Gabels, Holocaust survivors who immigrated to the United States in 1949, rebuilt their lives in Queens, New York. While still in her teens, Gwendolyn Straus joined AMIT — then known as the Mizrahi Women’s Organization of America — and was a lifelong Zionist. Joyce Straus, a longtime AMIT board member and officer, is AMIT’s former chair and its current vice president for financial resource development.

Founded in 1925, AMIT largely was a women’s organization until recently. In 2019, Alex Luxenberg of Great Neck, New York, became one of the first three men to join AMIT’s board in its nearly 100-year history. Luxenberg has been involved with AMIT for about 15 years and currently serves as AMIT’s vice president of marketing.

As the Nov. 20 gala event wound down and board members bade each other goodbye, some were careful to note that it was only “l’hitraaot” — see you later. Several board members will be joining an upcoming three-day support mission to Israel that begins on Dec. 4.

WASHINGTON (JTA) — The truce between Israel and Hamas that began on Friday has been extended for at least another two days, meaning that the Gaza-based terror group has pledged to release an additional 20 Israeli hostages beyond the approximately 50 it agreed to free in recent days.

Hamas, Qatar and the Biden administration all confirmed the extension of the truce, while Israeli government spokespeople declined to comment. The White House said that the 20 additional hostages will be women and children, as were the vast majority of the 40 hostages freed since Friday.

“The State of Qatar announces, as part of the ongoing mediation, an agreement has been reached to extend the humanitarian pause for an additional two days in the Gaza Strip,” Majed Al Ansari, the  spokesman for the Qatari Foreign Ministry, said on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

“Hamas declares that it has agreed with Qatar and Egypt to extend the temporary humanitarian truce for an additional two days under the same conditions reached before,” the group said on Telegram.

Israel is set to receive another group of 11 hostages on Monday night, fulfilling the terms of its initial deal with Hamas. In addition to the truce, Israel agreed to release some 150 Palestinian women and minors in Israeli prison on security offenses. It will release three Palestinian prisoners for each additional hostage freed by Hamas.

President Joe Biden has taken a leading role in brokering the agreement, and Qatar and Egypt have acted as intermediaries.

According to the mechanism in place under the existing truce, if Hamas relays to Israel by midnight the names of 10 hostages it plans to release the following day, Israel will extend the truce for 24 hours.

Hamas terrorists killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in their Oct. 7 attack on Israel, and abducted some 240. Israel launched counterstrikes and a ground invasion with the aim of deposing the terror group.  More than 13,000 Palestinians have been killed in the fighting, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, including thousands of children. It is not known what portion of that number are combatants, and what portion have been killed by misfired rockets aimed at Israel.

A growing group of progressive lawmakers and activists in the United States has called for a ceasefire in the conflict, which Israel has rebuffed because it would leave Hamas in power. Israel has vowed to resume the fighting following the truce, a stance the Biden administration has backed.

(JTA) — Police estimated that 50,000 people showed up for a march against antisemitism on Sunday in what reports are calling the largest such gathering in London since before World War II.

Organizers estimated that 60,000 attended the march, which was planned in reaction to the spike in antisemitism around the world that has accompanied the Israel-Hamas war that began on Oct. 7.

Speaking at the march, British Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis said Jews “will not be intimidated.”

“We must teach our children that the superheroes of our society are those who pursue peace and loving kindness, and not those who glorify violence and murder, and we must teach people that they must draw their conclusions from historical facts and not from what they see and hear on social media,” Mirvis said.

The march was organized by the Campaign Against Antisemitism, a watchdog founded in 2014 that publishes reports on government hate crime statistics and has sued prominent antisemites.

London police received reports of 657 antisemitic and 230 Islamophobic incidents between Oct.1 and Nov. 1, a significant jump in both categories. On Nov. 2, staff at London’s Wiener Holocaust Library — the world’s oldest Holocaust library and research center — found graffiti that read “Gaza” across their building’s sign.

Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson was among the rally’s attendees. Far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who goes by Tommy Robinson, was told beforehand by police to not attend over concerns that his presence could distress protesters and disturb peace. When he showed up, police arrested him.

Since Oct. 7, London has hosted some of the world’s largest pro-Palestinian protests. While one on Saturday gathered around 45,000, up to 300,000 attended a similar protest earlier this month. That same weekend, around 180,000 attended rallies against antisemitism in France.

The question of how police should handle pro-Palestinian protests has split Britain’s ruling Conservative Party. Suella Braverman, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s former home secretary, was fired after she wrote in an oped that London police are more lenient towards pro-Palestinian protesters than they are towards right-wing protesters.

At the 1936 Battle of Cable Street, London’s largest gathering against antisemitism, approximately a quarter-million people — a mix of Jews, Irish dock workers, the local working class and communists — gathered to prevent a government-sanctioned march by the British Union of Fascists through a Jewish neighborhood in the city.

Ahead of Sunday’s march, multiple BBC journalists petitioned their employer to let them join the rally but were rejected over rules to prevent bias.