(JTA) — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told a group of Jewish leaders that he planned to visit Israel, the clearest sign so far that he is intent on resetting a long-troubled relationship.

Erdogan also told a room full of leaders of American Jewish organizations that antisemitism is a “crime against humanity,” a meeting participant told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. The meeting Monday afternoon, convened under the auspices of the Turkish embassy and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, took place in New York City, where the United Nations General Assembly has gathered global diplomats this week.

Erdogan did not say when he would visit.

Turkey and Israel last month announced that they planned to restore full diplomatic ties, which have been ruptured since 2010, when Israel carried out a deadly raid on a Turkish vessel attempting to breach an Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip. Israeli President Isaac Herzog visited Turkey in March and Prime Minister Yair Lapid did during one of his last days as foreign minister in June.

The meeting was organized by Ezra Friedlander and his Friedlander Consulting Group, a lobbying organization that works largely with Orthodox Jewish groups but also counts the Turkish government among its clients. Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, Friedlander registered in 2022 that he works on behalf of the Turkish government.

According to OpenSecrets, an NGO which tracks spending on U.S. lobbyists, the Friedlander group has received at least $70,000 from the Turkish government this year.

“It was a very wide ranging interview,” Friedlander told JTA. Representatives of some 32 organizations, including the Conference of Presidents of Major American Organizations, AIPAC, J Street, the Zionist Organization of America and others, discussed Turkey’s trade relations ship with Israel, its acceptance of Ukrainian refugees and the safeguarding of sites of Jewish heritage in Turkey, among several other topics.

“It was a tremendous opportunity, really a tremendous opportunity,” Friedlander said. “There’s a role for the American Jewish community to play. Turkey is an important NATO ally of the United States. It’s a very, very sensitive area and a regional power, so there’s a tremendous amount of potential for cooperation.”

This was not the Turkish president’s first meeting with Jewish leaders in the last year. In November, he welcomed a delegation of rabbis from Islamic nations to his palace in Ankara for a discussion on the future of Jewish life in the Muslim world . 

“I think that the relationship between the Jewish community and Turkey has always been important and has always been strong,” said Rabbi Mendy Chitrik, a rabbi based in Istanbul who leads the Alliance of Rabbis in Islamic States (ARIS) and was present at both meetings with Erdogan. “Of course, it has had its ups and downs, but I’m happy that there seems to be a general shift in the Muslim world towards better relationships with Jews and the Jewish community. Of course this is something that we are always supporting.” 

Critics have alleged that Erdogan has used his warming relations with Jewish communities, at home and abroad, as a means to distract from Turkey’s worsening human rights record, and to ditch a reputation for antisemitism. 

As recently as 2021, during the most recent flare up between Israel and Gaza, Erdogan was castigated by the U.S. state department for statements they deemed as antisemitic. 

“They are murderers, to the point that they kill children who are five or six years old. They only are satisfied by sucking their blood,” Erdogan had said at the time, referring to Israelis. “It is in their nature.”

At a 2015 rally, he also lashed out at Western media, saying that “Jewish Capital” is behind The New York Times.

When asked about these statements, several of the attendees who spoke with JTA agreed that they were more focused on working towards the future with Erdogan than dredging up his past. 

“In this context, I’ll tell you that yesterday is very important, but today is more important, because the future is where it’s at.” said Rabbi Levi Shemtov, the executive vice president of American Friends of Lubavitch. “I am not about to forget the past, But I want to see it through the lens of what comes next. Because if no one in the world gets a chance to change, then we can’t expect progress where we need to.”

Shemtov said his biggest interest in meeting with the Turkish president was to build up his relationship with the international Jewish community, and ensure the security and comfort of Turkish Jews.

“I think we have to watch what he does now. And then see what he did before in the context of what he does going forward,” Shemtov added.

Harley Lippman, a member of AIPAC’s executive committee as well as former chair of the American Jewish Congress’s Board of Trustees, told JTA that other priorities leaders had included spreading awareness of the Holocaust throughout the Muslim world, and expelling Hamas leadership from Turkey.

As one of the few countries to maintain direct ties with Hamas, the militant group controlling the Gaza Strip, Turkey has proven a valued intermediary for Israel in its quest to ease tensions along its Gaza border.

“You know, people asked tough questions,” Lippman said. “We showed him pictures of him with Hamas leaders in Turkey, and showed him that they’re still left there.”

Turkey reportedly requested Hamas leaders living in Turkey to leave the country this summer, though many remain in the country. 

Erdogan is also seeking to tighten ties with the West as Russia drags on its war against Ukraine. He also wants to make sure Turkey is involved in energy exploration development in the eastern Mediterranean, which until now has been led by Israel and Greece.

Israel is seeking to build on the 2020 Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and four Arab countries. Israel hopes to add other Arab and Muslim-majority countries to the accords, a goal that enhanced relations with Turkey would facilitate.

On Sunday, the Turkish government’s official Twitter account posted on Twitter a video of Erdogan strolling through Central Park which included a cheerful encounter with a rabbi, Rachel Goldenberg, of Queens.

Cumhurbaşkanı @RTErdogan, BM 77. Genel Kurulu’na katılmak için bulunduğu New York kentindeki Central Park’ta bir süre yürüyüş yaptı. pic.twitter.com/2lbU7w9TIv

— T.C. Cumhurbaşkanlığı (@tcbestepe) September 18, 2022

(New York Jewish Week) — As antisemitic incidents continue to rise in New York City, a new city-led initiative seeks to address antisemitism on a hyper-local level.

Called “Understanding Jewish Experiences and Antisemitism,” the initiative from the City’s Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), which enforces New York City’s Human Rights Law, aims to educate New Yorkers about their Jewish neighbors — and therefore decrease hate as a whole across the city. The training initiative received a brief mention in City Hall’s Mayor Management Report which was released on Friday, Sept. 16.

The 500-page report gave updated numbers on an assortment of city agencies and programs, including those addressing crime, pandemic response and education. Among the key findings were that hate crimes had risen by 35%, which the report said was “partly due to an influx of incidents during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and amid heightened racial and political tensions across the country.”

Hate crimes against Jewish New Yorkers, in particular, have increased every month in 2022 when compared to the previous year. In a separate report, the NYPD reported 24 hate crimes against Jewish New Yorkers in August 2022, a 118 percent increase from last year. As a whole, hate crimes against Jewish New Yorkers have increased every month in 2022 so far when compared to the previous year.

This rise is one of the reasons the new antisemitism training was developed, Jonah Boyarin, a CCHR Jewish community liaison, told the New York Jewish Week.

“Our hope for this training is that everyday New Yorkers can become empowered to understand their Jewish neighbors better and to look out for them, to interrupt antisemitism when they see it in everyday life,” Boyarin said.

He added that another goal is to build cultural competence among New Yorkers interacting, living and working with everyday Jewish New Yorkers, “including Orthodox and non-Orthodox communities.”

“The training is grounded in a human rights lens and addresses antisemitism and its harmful impacts on our society, particularly on Jewish New Yorkers,” the report said about the Jewish-oriented program. It is administered by the Community Relations Bureau (CRB), the educational wing of the CCHR.

Boyarin did not provide specific numbers on individuals who have received the specific training on antisemitism, but said it has been presented to multiple New York City agencies, community-based organizations and houses of worship. According to the latest City Hall report, 107,136 people have received CRB trainings, 4.9% more than 2021. The CCHR held 1,794 conferences, workshops and trainings, an increase of just over 6.5% from 2021.

Boyarin said the trainings will be presented this fall to public school students, though details are “still in the works,” he said.

“It’s a new training, but we’re already seeing high demand for it,” Boyarin said. “We’re glad to see that. We’re here to meet that demand.”

He added that many Jewish organizations were included in the development of the training to make sure all Jewish viewpoints were represented.

A spokesperson from United Jewish Organization of Williamsburg, an organization that advocates for the Satmar Hasidic community in Brooklyn, told the New York Jewish Week the group “reviewed the training and edited parts of it.”

“We strongly feel that it’s important,” the spokesperson said. “It was to help people understand us and our customs.”

A spokesperson from the Jewish Community Relations Council told the New York Jewish Week that they were “consultants on the report” but declined to comment further.

The training, which was developed by the CCHR in conjunction with Staten Island’s Wagner College Holocaust Center, was quietly launched in April 2022, according to a city press release. Mayor Eric Adams said in the press release that the new training “will help us develop a stronger cultural competence and understanding of New York’s diverse Jewish communities.”

The training will be offered by the CCHR upon request.

Boyarin said that some versions of the training have a focus on “cultural competence with the Orthodox Jewish communities,” citing “a strong demand for that from the public and it’s something our Orthodox Jewish community partners wanted.”

That desire likely stems from continued attacks on visibly Jewish people in New York City, with a recent spate of reported attacks in Brooklyn, where the majority of Orthodox Jews live. In August, the NYPD announced more patrols in Williamsburg due to the frequency of antisemitic attacks there.

Another day and another disturbing incident in #BoroPark. This despicable incident happened this afternoon but thanks to our volunteers, she was caught and subsequently arrested by @NYPD66Pct. @NYPDHateCrimes pic.twitter.com/kCEfFpqbrb

— 𝐁𝐨𝐫𝐨 𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐤 𝐒𝐡𝐨𝐦𝐫𝐢𝐦 (@BPShomrim) September 18, 2022

Over the weekend, yet another video of antisemitism went viral, this time showing a woman accosting an Orthodox man knocking his kippah and shtreimel, a fur cap, off his head. The video was released by the neighborhood watch group Boro Park Shomrim, who added that the woman was arrested.

The video drew a response from elected officials, including Mayor Adams, who said on Twitter on Sunday that “these outrageous attacks on our Jewish community won’t be tolerated, not in our city.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul also shared the video, saying that “acts of antisemitism are abhorrent and unacceptable.”

Last Thursday, Bronx Rep. Ritchie Torres wrote a letter urging the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Attorney General to investigate New York’s rising antisemitism.

“I am respectfully asking the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department to consider investigating New York’s systematic failure to police and prosecute hate crimes and to issue recommendations to reform,” Torres said.

The letter highlighted data from the Anti-Defamation League, which showed that New York led the nation in antisemitic incidents in 2021, with 416 incidents — accounting for 15% of the total antisemitic incidents reported across the country.

Torres’ letter also referenced a story in the online Jewish magazine Tablet showing that hate crimes committed against Jews in New York City since 2018 rarely result in punishment or conviction.

Boyarin recognized the rise in antisemitism and said the agency’s function is “helping the city be its best self.”

“We hope through this training that New Yorkers will be ever more understanding and respectful of the rich diversity that Jewish New Yorkers, along with all other New Yorkers of all backgrounds, bring to the city,” he said.

LONDON (JTA) — When her son was diagnosed with autism, Ali Sultman was faced with a difficult choice.

To give him the Jewish education her family believed in, she could either enroll him at a regular day school that wasn’t set up to accommodate his needs, or she could put him in what was then London’s only Jewish school for children with special needs. But the latter, Kisharon, catered mostly to children with more severe disabilities than her son faced.

“Like many others, we needed a middle option that just didn’t exist at the time,” said Sultman, a 45-year-old mother of three and former insurance executive. 

So she and another Modern Orthodox mom whom she had met on a playground in 2013 set about opening a new Jewish school called Gesher, Hebrew for “bridge.” Since its opening in 2017, the school has filled a gap in London’s otherwise robust array of Jewish education options — and in doing so, it has emerged as a rare hub of interaction among Jewish families of vastly different religious observance.

Gesher has students from insular haredi Orthodox communities who normally never consider non-haredi yeshivas, and it also enrolls children from secular homes. The school aims to make everyone comfortable by committing to a Modern Orthodox approach.

“Haredi communities are very protective of outside influences. You wouldn’t find haredi Jews with other Jews,” said Josh Aronson, a Manchester-based Jewish journalist and activist for people with disabilities who comes from a haredi home and has an autism spectrum disorder. “Maybe at restaurants they’ll be sitting at separate tables but the children especially don’t mix. So a place like Gesher is very, very rare.”

A boutique school of about 50 students ages 4-12 in northwest London, Gesher is in some ways a testament to the shortcomings of London’s Jewish day schools. Many of them cannot adequately serve students with autism, attention disorders and other learning disabilities.

But the school also adds to an increasing number of programs that suggest the Jewish education sector is taking special education more seriously. Like Shefa, a Jewish school founded in 2014 in New York City that serves children with language disorders, Gesher aims to ensure that children don’t have to give up Jewish education to have their disabilities addressed.

Housed on the grounds of the recently closed Moriah Jewish Day School, Gesher has inherited a spacious location complete with play rooms and a large auditorium, as well as a formidable security arrangement that is characteristic of Jewish schools in much of the world amid rising reports of antisemitic crimes.  

The new building to which the school moved in 2020 is a major upgrade to the small, one-story building where the school first opened. 

“It’s roomy but it looks like a normal school, which helps create a feeling of normalcy that many of our students need,” said Tamaryn Yartu, the school’s South Africa-born principal who, like many of the educators on staff, is not Jewish. One of her students, she recalled, recently said proudly that Gesher “looks just like my brother’s school” after the move into the new building.

But there are some special adaptations at Gesher’s classrooms. Wobble cushions, for example, are never too far away, and chairs have rubber bands on their legs — a setup developed at the school to accommodate fidgeting and to help children with ADHD and similar issues sit through classes. There is also often some animal at Gesher — usually a dog — that volunteers and staff bring for the children to interact with as a form of therapy. The school’s website lists one canine staffer: a trainee therapy cockapoo named Puplinda Gurney.

During a recent show, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” a production that’s part of the Spoek Ivrit theater festival for British Jewish school organized the the United Kingdom branch of the Jewish National Fund, or JNF, children who found it difficult to sit through a play were allowed to “chill out,” as one teacher termed it, in a seating area until they were ready to return. 

When a child was being too disruptive, a teacher escorted the student out to one of the school’s multiple play corners. One girl was wearing “ear defenders,” or muting headphones meant to alleviate her sensitivity to noises.

The Israeli actors in the show were made aware that Gesher is a special needs school and adapted the show so that children in the audience would be engaged — they were encouraged to shout out answers to the question raised by the actors — but not put on the spot.

Shows and other special class events are an opportunity to find middle ground “between children of different backgrounds, like the ones at Gesher,” Samuel Hayek, the chairman of JNF-UK, told JTA. “These events are inclusive, empowering and having Gesher take part was a must for us,” Hayek said.

The school has made a difference in the life of many of its students and their parents, including Ali Durban, the cofounder whose chance encounter with Sultman on a London playground resulted in Gesher’s creation.

Durban’s son was “miserable” at the Jewish school that he had attended before Gesher’s creation in 2017, she said. “He was isolated socially” in his class, where there was only one other child with special needs. 

“He was bullied because he was different and the experience left a mark on him,” Durban added. She calls her son’s time in school before Gesher “the dark years.”

Gesher is a private school and charges about $45,000 a year in tuition. But many of the parents have arranged for the tuition to be reimbursed or to be paid directly by their local council, which in the United Kingdom provides subsidies for special education to those eligible.

The school’s program combines a curriculum required by the English education ministry, known as Ofsted; Jewish and Hebrew-language studies; and therapy sessions designed to help the children develop their own techniques for overcoming learning and other disabilities, Yartu said.

“Many of the parents are very interested in preparing the children to be able to come to synagogue without being disruptive,” she said. “But being spoken at for an hour is asking a lot from a child with attention issues. It takes a lot of work and preparation.”  

Gesher’s approach, small classes and abundance of staff — there are almost as many staff as there are students — are appealing to parents beyond the Modern Orthodox community. One such couple is the Feldmans, haredi parents from northern London whose 8-year-old son enrolled at Gesher last January. The child was unhappy at his haredi school, said the mother, who agreed to be identified only by her last name, citing privacy concerns. The couple was paying thousands of dollars for therapy sessions that seemed to only slightly help, she added. But the couple were still reluctant about sending the boy to Gesher, which they felt fell short of meeting their community’s religious standards. 

“It’s less strictly Orthodox. It wasn’t like how I was brought up, and it was overwhelming for us,” she said. The haredi school where the Feldmans initially enrolled their son recommended moving him to Gesher and the couple’s rabbi approved the switch, she said. But leaving the haredi education system took some getting used to, she added. 

“Once we got over that, we realized, like it’s not for us, it’s for our child,” the mother said. “This is what we need to do for the school to be right for him to be happy and confident and you know, be a member of society.”

They experienced almost instant relief.  

“From the first week at Gesher, he’s suddenly become happy. He’s blossomed like I’ve never seen before. He’s so confident, he’s in the classroom, he’s got friends for the first time. Finally he’s in an environment that understands him,” Feldman said.

Now, for the first time in their lives, the Feldmans have made friends who are not haredi — a Modern Orthodox couple whose child also goes to Gesher who live near them. “It’s kind of inevitable because it’s a small school and there’s a community of parents around it that we belong to now,“ she said. 

On the other end of the observance spectrum, Pamela Sneader, a Glasgow-born Jewish mother of two, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that her daughter, Daisy, is going to Gesher “because it’s an excellent special needs school, not because it’s Jewish. That’s just a bonus.” Sneader arrived at Gesher after multiple schools told her they were not equipped to teach her daughter, who is autistic.

“I came to Gesher and it was like ‘no problem, we can totally handle it,’ which was a huge relief. My daughter has blossomed there, mostly in terms of confidence and having friends and playdates for the first time in her life,” Sneader said.

After visiting Gesher for the first time this year, Aronson, 36, came away wishing such a school had existed when he was growing up. 

“I was bullied by teachers and students at the regular haredi school I went to,” said Aronson, who has 13 siblings and whose father is a rabbi. “Nobody knew what I had and I desperately needed the kind of support you see at Gesher.”

(JTA) — Crowds at separate rallies headlined by former President Donald Trump and his favored nominee for Pennsylvania governor, Doug Mastriano, raised their right hands in unison, creating images that critics of the two politicians compared to the Nazi salute.

New York State Sen. Anna Kaplan, a Jewish Democrat, said Sunday in a statement that both rallies invoked Nazi imagery.

“Last night at a rally held by the former President, and today at a political rally held by a candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania, supporters were urged to hold up their right hands in a unified salute that should shock the conscience of every American for its remarkable similarity to the ‘Heil Hitler’ salute used by the Nazis,” Kaplan wrote. “I call on these campaigns to immediately end the use of this shocking salute in their rallies.”

A speaker at a Mastriano rally on Sunday in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, asked the crowd to raise their right hands as he likened Mastriano’s gubernatorial bid to a bloody Civil War battle in nearby Gettysburg.

“Can you say what they said at Gettysburg when you see us lined up, as one! Sweep down the hill to victory,” the speaker said. The crowd raised their arms and the speaker counted down from three; on the count of “one,” the crowd brought their hands down at the same time and cried out “AS ONE!”

The Lincoln Project, an organization of former Republicans who oppose Trump, posted a video on Monday intercutting the Chambersburg rally with footage of Nazi rallies featuring the “Sieg Heil” salute.

Mastriano has drawn criticism, including from some Republicans, for his associations with the far-right social media platform Gab, which is known as a haven for white nationalist, antisemitic and other extremist content.

Trump spoke rally on Saturday in Youngstown, Ohio, where the former president was campaigning for Senate hopeful J.D. Vance. As Trump listed what he said were catastrophes besetting America, rallygoers raised their right arms and index fingers in a salute as a song almost identical to one identified with the QAnon conspiracy theory movement played, The New York Times reported. The index finger could have been a reference to the numeral 1 in name of the song, “Wwg1wga” — an abbreviation of the QAnon phrase “Where we go one, we go all.”

The QAnon movement has, among other things, accused Democrats and other liberal figures of pedophilia and power-grabbing, while incorporating some antisemitic conspiracy theories into its worldview.. The Trump campaign denied any connection.

New York Magazine compiled analysis that suggested the salute could have other origins, including other groups on the far right, or evangelical Christians.

Prominent commentators compared the salutes at both rallies to the infamous Nazi gesture.

The display bore an uncanny resemblance to the infamous Nazi salute. The incitement and zombie-like response should put to rest the notion that Biden should be “reaching out” to these people. They are unreachable, and pretending otherwise misleads voters. https://t.co/jf5pnPpn20

— Jennifer Truth Over Phony Balance Rubin 🇺🇦🇮🇱 (@JRubinBlogger) September 19, 2022

Yes, this is a Nazi salute, at a Doug Mastriano campaign event in Pennsylvania. In 2022.

Democracy is literally on the ballot in November.

pic.twitter.com/unKyQKDN9A

— Tristan Snell (@TristanSnell) September 18, 2022

 

(JTA) – The Jewish Federation of New Mexico has nearly run out of money and staff, and all of its programs have been suspended or are being handed over to other community entities, according to interviews and court records.

The dysfunction is the result of mounting acrimony at a 74-year-old institution responsible for serving the state’s estimated 24,000 Jews. After board resignations, lawsuits and the flight of many longtime donors over the past two years, the board has been discussing dissolving the federation entirely.

“All the programs are gone,” said federation board member Marina Rabinowitz, who agreed to join the embattled board in January in hope of turning things around. “The federation used to give grant money to almost all Jewish institutions across the state. But not anymore.”

Among the programs and grantees affected are the Jewish Care Program, which aids the elderly, including Holocaust survivors, and is being transferred to the Jewish Community Center of Greater Albuquerque; PJ Library, which provides books for free to Jewish families; the Santa Fe Jewish Film Festival; and the Hillel chapter at the University of New Mexico.

“The situation in New Mexico is unacceptable and we will do everything in our power to ensure that the federation is able to continue serving the Jewish community, supporting Jewish infrastructure, uplifting Jewish life, and serving the most vulnerable,” said Eric Fingerhut, president and CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America, which represents 450 communities across North America.

What the future holds for New Mexico’s Jewish community is unclear. For now, all “central” programs traditionally supported through federation funding are still in operation, according to a JFNA spokesperson.

But even if the federation folds, donors could materialize to keep the programs afloat independently and the programs that have lost employees could be restaffed under new arrangements.

The dispute in New Mexico, which the Jewish Telegraphic Agency first exposed in March, centers on the tenure of Rob Lennick, the federation’s former executive director, who departed recently. He has since been hired to head The Jewish Federation of Volusia & Flagler Counties, serving the area of Daytona Beach, Florida, a JFNA spokesperson has confirmed.

Several staff members began complaining in late 2020 that Lennick was prone to fits of rage and was at times intimidating and hostile. Lennick denied those allegations, finding support among the executive committee of the federation’s board.

The executive committee moved to offer Lennick a loan and a contract extension and the board approved the offer in a vote in February 2021. But shortly after, several board members accused the executive committee of concealing the complaints against Lennick before the vote.

About half the board soon resigned and four members who stayed on filed a lawsuit. They are now asking a New Mexico court to take over the federation to ensure its management structure can be overhauled.

Lennick is now considering filing his own lawsuit because he says he has been unfairly maligned, according to his attorney, Daymon Ely, who declined to say who might be targeted in the lawsuit.

“I’m not going to name names, but you have people that have a little bit of power and in my judgment, have abused that power,” Ely said. “We’re considering bringing a lawsuit because he has left and they continue to blame him for things that were not his fault. They’re still talking about the acrimony being his responsibility, but I think he really did try to turn down the volume and I think the facts will show that he tried to do a good job.”

Current members of the executive committee did not respond to requests for comment. David Blacher, who resigned as president of the federation, declined to comment.

In January, with many of the board seats vacant, the executive committee recruited Rabinowitz. An economist by profession, she agreed and saw an opportunity to contribute by sorting out what appeared as messy financial accounting.

But she says that when she asked for access to the federation’s books, she was rebuffed by the executive committee. After repeatedly “begging,” she says she was finally given some numbers, such as a profit and loss statement, but not any documentation that would validate the figures.

“I have no confidence that whatever is presented there is actually true,” Rabinowitz told JTA.

What she has been able to establish is that the federation coffers recently dwindled to about $22,000, a minuscule amount for an organization with a proposed budget of about $1 million in 2020, and a massive drop from three years ago when the federation reported that it had 18 months in operating expenses in its reserves.

Rabinowitz is not sure where the money has gone. At least some of it is going to pay the lawyer representing the executive committee members in court, according to court records.

“I do not know what here is mismanagement and what is fraud,” Rabinowitz said. “The only thing that I can tell you is that an organization that has existed for over 70 years was destroyed in the last three years.”

Shelly Prant, the executive director of Albuquerque Jewish Community Center, said she believes the community will rally to ensure essential programs will continue and that her organization and others are prepared to pick up any slack created by the problems at the federation.

“There’s a core group of people in Albuquerque and around the state that are really caring, passionate and philanthropic,” Prant said. “And they’re really taking all this very seriously and trying to help, and so at the end of the day, we’ll be okay even though right now, it is challenging.”

(JTA) — Iran’s leadership has returned to Holocaust denial, its leader made clear in an interview with “60 Minutes,” after distancing itself from the phenomenon.

“Historical events should be investigated by researchers and historians,” Ebrahim Raisi, the Iranian president, said in an interview on the CBS News flagship broadcast Sunday when he asked if he believed the Holocaust occurred. “There are some signs that it happened. If so, they should allow it to be investigated and researched.”

The interview aired at the same time that PBS was showing the first installment of a six-hour new documentary, by Ken Burns, about the Holocaust. “The U.S. and the Holocaust” is the latest prominent work to make use of the vast trove of research available to scholars and laymen to show in meticulous detail evidence of the Nazi genocide of European Jewry.

The falsehood that research that would deny the Holocaust is being repressed is a commonplace trope among Holocaust deniers.

“Raisi’s call for ‘research’ to determine whether the Holocaust happened is ludicrous and dangerous,” Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. antisemitism monitor, said in a statement. “His statement is a form of Holocaust denial and a form of antisemitism.”

Raisi, a hard-liner elected last year, was echoing the position peddled by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president from 2005 to 2013, who made an ostentatious point of denying the Holocaust. The subsequent government, led from 2013 to 2021 by Hassan Rouhani, a relative moderate, sought to distance itself from Holocaust denial.

Responding to a tweet quoting Raisi, Israeli interim prime minister Yair Lapid offered just two words — “Some signs” alongside four black-and-white photographs showing starved and murdered Holocaust victims. He was one of many people to lampoon the Iranian president’s comments on social media.

https://twitter.com/yairlapid/status/1571732099547398145

Lt. Gen. Aviv Kohavi, the Israeli army chief of staff, visiting Poland, said the tendency of the Iranian regime to deny the Holocaust was one reason Iran should never obtain a nuclear weapon.

“Anyone who lies and denies the painful and solid truth of history easily lies today, and will naturally lie in the future,” Kohavi said Monday while visiting Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp, the Times of Israel reported. “This is another reminder that such people should not be allowed to possess any capacity of any kind for development of weapons of mass destruction.”

In the interview, Raisi also repeated the long-held position of the Iranian government that Israel does not have a right to exist.

Meanwhile, Israel on Sunday issued an advisory citing increasing evidence of Iranian plots against Israelis abroad. “We estimate that in the coming period Iran will continue to work to promote damage to Israeli targets around the world, both in countries near Iran and in Western and European countries,” Israel’s National Security Headquarters said in the advisory.

Sienna Nazarian grew up in Beverly Hills, California, listening to her family tell stories about leaving Iran during its 1979 revolution because, as Jews, they no longer felt safe.

Her father and grandparents on both sides fled Iran. (Her mother was born in the United States.)

“They talked about the sense of powerlessness that fleeing created for them,” Sienna said. 

That vulnerability resonated with Sienna, and she decided early on that she wanted to help refugees undergoing similar experiences. When it came time to choose a project for her bat mitzvah, she worked with the Los Angeles-based Jewish community IKAR to help collect and send musical instruments to Syrian refugees in refugee camps in Greece.

Myriad volunteer efforts followed. Then, after she began high school, Sienna was inspired to launch her own project to help new refugees adjust to life in Southern California, offering services including learning English and obtaining essential items such as clothes, toiletries and school supplies.

Since Sienna and a classmate, Lily Sind, launched the Refugee Empowerment Project in 2020, they’ve helped over 1,000 refugees and recruited 120 teen and adult volunteers along the way.

Sienna, now 18 and in her senior year of high school, was recently recognized for her efforts and named one of the recipients of the 2022 Diller Teen Tikkun Olam Awards. The $36,000 award is given annually by the Helen Diller Family Foundation to up to 15 extraordinary teenagers who exemplify the Jewish value of tikkun olam, repairing the world. The recipients can choose to use the funds toward their education or further their project, or both.

With more than 82 million people around the world displaced by wars and disasters in countries such as Ukraine, Syria and Venezuela, according to the International Rescue Committee, Sienna says helping this population is critical.

“With Ukraine, that’s a really pressing refugee crisis that is on the news, and everyone’s talking about it, but there have also been other refugee crises that are still going on and are overlooked,” she said. 

Some 80,000 Jews lived in Iran during the 1970s. In 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini seized power and established the fundamentalist Islamic state that persists to this day. Amid the revolution, religious minorities including Jews had their freedoms curtailed, and some prominent Jews were executed. Today, an estimated 5,000 to 8,000 Jews remain in the country. 

Many of those who fled ended up in Los Angeles. 

“My grandparents at our Shabbat dinners on Fridays would talk about stories from Iran and show me pictures, and I always had this desire to connect with that, but I also knew that I could never go there,” Sienna said.

Starting a new life in America was not easy for Sienna’s family. Her grandfather went to night school to learn English after long days at work. 

“He was willing to do whatever it took to be able to build a life not only for himself but for his wife and his kids,” Sienna said.

The summer before high school, Sienna expanded her knowledge about the experience of refugees from places other than Iran. She tried to get involved with several organizations assisting refugees but often was told she was too young to volunteer.

So during her freshman year, Sienna and Lily started a school club to help refugees. The International Institute of Los Angeles connected them with teenage sisters who had recently arrived from Afghanistan. Sienna and Lily took them on an outing to the Santa Monica pier and provided them with supplies for the upcoming school year with the money the organization raised. 

“It was a really great connection because of the overlap between our ages and, honestly, both our Middle Eastern cultures,” Sienna recalled.

In March 2020, she and Lily decided to expand the club to an independent organization. They started reaching out to students across Los Angeles to spread awareness about refugee crises and create opportunities for teens to help refugees, immigrants and asylum seekers. 

“Because we were so young, it was hard to establish a sense of credibility,” Sienna said. “We had to basically convince all of these established partner refugee organizations that we had the ability to make a meaningful impact and actually have operational programs.”

These programs include creating lesson plans for learning English; training volunteers on how to communicate with refugees and respond to their trauma and needs; and starting orientation tours for refugees of Los Angeles landmarks, providing information in their native languages about their new neighborhoods, important contacts and details on American slang, among other information.

Most of the Refugee Empowerment Project’s clients come from the Middle East or Central America. In one typical case, Sienna took a family seeking asylum from El Salvador on an outing to the Griffith Observatory and provided them with contact information for government representatives, local pharmacies and police stations.

When a teenage girl in the family mentioned that her mother didn’t know where to take her little brother to play, Sienna started including local playgrounds in her community orientations. 

The Refugee Empowerment Project recently hosted a conference focused on mental health in which speakers discussed local mental health services and the refugee experience and conducted meditation and mindfulness exercises.

Sienna said she plans to use the funding from the Diller Award to help refugees fund their education. 

She has one year remaining in high school and isn’t sure where she’ll go to college. Wherever she ends up, Sienna said, she hopes to expand her organization’s impact through ambassadors on various college campuses.

“This is not just a high school project, but definitely something I want to continue doing,” she said.

(JTA) — The famous Russian singer Alla Pugacheva made international headlines Sunday when she issued a statement condemning Russia’s war on Ukraine in an Instagram post expressing support for her Jewish husband, the comedian Maksim Galkin.

Russian authorities last week added Galkin to a growing list of “foreign agents,” a label they often apply to people and groups seen as critical of the government. The Russian Ministry of Justice claims that Galkin serves and receives support from Ukraine, according to the Russian-language news organization Meduza.

Galkin, a satirist and former TV game show host who is Jewish, said on the first day of the war that he had spoken with family and friends in Ukraine, where his mother was born in Odessa. “Words cannot express how am feeling! How is this even possible!” he wrote on Instagram at the time. “There can be no excuse for war! No to war!” His comments and subsequent ones, including in song, earned him condemnation from a top Russian official earlier this month.

“I won’t abandon humor and satire to suit the political climate,” Galkin said in response. “I joked about our politicians before, and I’ll keep joking.”

On Sunday, shortly after Galkin’s official designation as a foreign agent, Pugacheva asked to join her husband on the list, saying that the war is causing “the death of our guys for illusory goals” and that Russian citizens’ lives are growing worse because their country has become a global pariah.

It was a notable statement given the risk of speaking out against the war – or even identifying Russia’s action in Ukraine as a war, which Pugacheva did not do — amid laws cracking down on dissent in Russia. But if anyone can be heard within Russia, it is Pugacheva, who at 73 has been a household name and beloved voice across the country for more than four decades.

Until recently, Pugacheva and Galkin’s relationship was most notable for their wide age gap — she is 27 years older than he is — and the fact that Galkin is Pugacheva’s fifth husband, and soon to be longest-lasting. A couple since 2001, the pair married in 2011 and welcomed twins via a surrogate in 2013.

Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, the family relocated to Israel, where Galkin’s mother was treated for and died of cancer, joining the tens of thousands of Russian Jews who landed there amid concerns about the war and its affect on life in Russia. But Pugacheva signaled on Instagram at the time that the family had not emigrated, and Russian media reports suggest that she and the children returned to Moscow this summer in advance of the new school year.

Galkin, who like his wife is a household name in Russia and among Russian speakers worldwide, appears to remain abroad, Meduza reported this week. He recently announced a North American tour for early 2023.

“I request to be added to the ranks of foreign agents of my beloved country,” Pugacheva wrote in her statement. “I am in solidarity with my husband, an honest, respectable and genuine person who is a true and incorruptible patriot of Russia, who wishes his Motherland prosperity, peaceful life, freedom of speech and the end of the death of our guys for illusory goals that are turning our country into a pariah and worsening the lives of our citizens.”

Moscow’s broadening definition of foreign agents has placed any organization based outside of the country at risk of sanctions if it receives support, not just funding, from abroad. That has worried representatives of Jewish groups that continue to seek to serve Russian Jews despite the war and its effects. The Jewish Agency for Israel, which facilitates emigration to Israel, is in the midst of a legal process that could result in the closure of its Russia operations in part because of its sharing of information about Russian Jews with others outside the country.

(JTA) — Authorities in Berlin are investigating two attacks on Jewish train riders reported on the same day last week, amid a rise in the number of reported incidents of antisemitism in that city.

In one incident that took place Sept. 13, Ariel Kirzon, the Orthodox rabbi who leads the community of Potsdam, a Berlin suburb, said he was speaking Hebrew on a cell phone outside a commuter rail station when a man pushed him and insulted him with anti-Jewish slurs, calling him a “schrecklicher Scheissjude” (terrible f—ing Jew).

Kirzon said his 13-year-old son, who was with him at the time, is now fearful about living in Germany and the family is considering sending him to the United States to live. “I have traveled the United States very often, been to all the big cities,” the rabbi, who is affiliated with the Chabad movement, told the BZ tabloid. “Nothing like this has ever happened to me there.”

Later the same day, a 33-year-old man was verbally attacked and beaten in the S-bahn commuter train, Berlin police announced. The attacker reportedly used anti-Jewish slurs, and proceeded — together with another man — to beat the victim around the head and upper body. Another passenger tried to protect the victim, who then got off the train, while the perpetrator remained on board. The victim’s physical injuries were not serious enough to warrant treatment, police said.

Both cases are under investigation by the State Security Service, and the victims have filed charges. In at least Kirzon’s case, investigators said they have secured surveillance video of the station, but the perpetrators remain at large.

The reports come amid a rising tally of antisemitic incidents in Berlin, according to the Research and Information Center on Anti-Semitism, a German watchdog organization, known as RIAS. The group documented 1,052 incidents in 2021, including 22 physical attacks; more than half of the reports involved online antisemitism. The totals in 2020 and 2019 were 1,019 and 886 respectively.

The nationwide statistics have Jewish leaders worried, as well. Germany’s most recent report on annual antisemitic crimes nationwide, released in May, noted a nearly 29% increase in such crimes in 2021 over the previous year. It is based on statistics reported in May by the Federal Criminal Police Office, Germany’s equivalent to the FBI.

Since reporting the attack against him last week, Kirzon has called for more security to be provided to his community in Potsdam. Police patrol the synagogue on holidays, but he would like officers present during the rest of the year, too, according to German news reports.

Kirzon, who emigrated to Germany from Ukraine 10 years ago, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he experienced an antisemitic incident in 2019 while walking at night in Berlin during the Passover holiday: Four men, who were carrying bottles and were apparently drunk, hurled “the worst” anti-Jewish slurs at him in Russian, he said. There was no physical attack in that case, he told JTA in a phone interview Monday.

“They looked to see how I would react, and I pretended I did not understand Russian,” he recalled. Kirzon reported this incident to RIAS but not to the police. “I kept on walking, because I already have experiences in Ukraine, also with drunkards.” He said he knew someone who was seriously injured after defending himself.

He said there have been no arrests in the latest case; the police have not contacted him since Thursday, when they took the jacket he had been wearing as evidence.

(JTA) — Germany’s flagship airline has joined with a major American Jewish advocacy organization to combat global antisemitism, four months after igniting a scandal when its agents barred dozens of Jews from boarding a plane in Frankfurt.

Under the terms of the partnership announced last week, American Jewish Committee staffers will train employees of the Lufthansa Group to identify and respond to antisemitism. The airline is also joining dozens of countries, states and companies that have adopted a specific definition of antisemitism to guide their own activities.

The partnership is the latest commitment by Lufthansa following the negative headlines it earned in May after 100 Orthodox Jewish passengers flying from New York to Budapest were barred from boarding a connecting flight. Airline staffers said the decision had been made because because some of them had not worn masks and had gathered in the aisles, going against flight regulations.

But antisemitism watchdogs including the AJC, which has an office in Berlin, strongly criticized the airline for permitting the collective punishment of Jewish passengers at the time, many of whom did not appear to have engaged in the objectionable behavior.

Shortly afterward, Lufthansa CEO Jens Ritter informed the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations that Lufthansa had established an internal task force to investigate the case. The firm, which earlier had apologized to the passengers involved, blamed miscommunication for the “categorically inappropriate” decision to bar them all — and not just those who were non-compliant — from boarding.

In July, Ritter said the company would appoint a senior management position “for the prevention of discrimination and antisemitism.” Lufthansa has since endorsed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, known as IHRA, which also has been adopted by the U.S. Department of State, the German Bundestag and multiple other governments as their official referee for what constitutes antisemitism. (The definition has drawn criticism for its characterization of some forms of Israel criticism as antisemitic.)

Holly Huffnagle, AJC’s U.S. director of combatting antisemitism, said in a joint statement that she was grateful for Lufthansa’s commitment to fighting workplace bias of all kinds. “As global antisemitism rises, the private sector increasingly has a role to play,” she said.

This week’s announcement followed meetings in Washington, D.C., between a top Lufthansa board member, Christina Foerster, and a host of heavyweights, including Deborah Lipstadt, U.S special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism; Felix Klein, Germany’s commissioner for Jewish life and the fight against antisemitism; Emily Haber, German ambassador to the United States; and Michael Herzog, Israel’s ambassador to the United States.