(JTA) — The Jewish Agency’s nominating committee recommended Doron Almog, a storied retired general and a longtime advocate for people with disabilities, to lead the body that bridges Israel and the Jewish Diaspora.

The nomination Thursday of Almog, 71, now goes to the Jewish Agency’s Board of Governors, where it is all but assured of approval. The nomination follows an extended period of consideration since May 2021, when the last chairman of the agency, Isaac Herzog, announced his successful run for the Israeli presidency.

The agency has been led in the interim by an acting chairman, Yaakov Hagoel.

Almog has a long career in the military, assisting in the 1976 raid on Entebbe, Uganda to free a plane held hostage by German and Palestinian terrorists. He helped to lead the secret airlift of Ethiopian Jews in the mid-1980s, and led the Southern Command, which had Gaza as a responsibility, during the Second Intifada.

An Israel Prize laureate, Almog has also led disability advocacy. He founded  Adi Negev-Nahalat Eran Rehabilitation Village, named for his son Eran, who died at 23 from Castleman’s disease, a lymph disorder.

The Jewish Agency, established in 1929, handles numerous aspects of the Israel-Diaspora relationship, including fund-raising for Israel, encouraging and absorbing immigrants in partnership with the Israeli government, and running Jewish education and identity-building programs at home and abroad. Its funding is provided by North American  Jewish federations, together with the federations’ counterparts in other countries and other donors.

The nomination committee reportedly considered more than a dozen candidates, including a number of women and Sephardic Jews — neither group is represented among the chairmen of the agency going back to 1929. Serious consideration reportedly was given to Idan Roll, the deputy foreign minister who is a leader of Israel’s LGBTQ community.

(JTA) — When a Google engineer told an interviewer that an artificial intelligence (AI) technology developed by the company had become “sentient,” it touched off a passionate debate about what it would mean for a machine to have human-like self-awareness.

Why the hullabaloo? In part, the story feeds into current anxieties that AI itself will somehow threaten humankind, and that “thinking” machines will develop wills of their own.

But there is also the deep concern that if a machine is sentient, it is no longer an inanimate object with no moral status or “rights” (e.g., we owe nothing to a rock) but rather an animate being with the status of a “moral patient” to whom we owe consideration.

I am a rabbi and an engineer and am currently writing my doctoral thesis on the “Moral Status of AI” at Bar Ilan University. In Jewish terms, if machines become sentient, they become the object of the command “tzar baalei hayim” — which demands we not harm living creatures. Philosopher Jeremy Bentham similarly declared that entities become moral subjects when we answer the question “Can they suffer?” in the affirmative.

This is what makes the Google engineer’s claim alarming, for he has shifted the status of the computer, with whom he had a conversation, from an object to a subject. That is, the computer (known as LaMDA) can no longer be thought of as a machine but as a being that “can suffer,” and hence a being with moral rights.

“Sentience” is an enigmatic label used in philosophy and AI circles referring to the capacity to feel, to experience. It is a generic term referring to some level of consciousness, believed to exist in biological beings on a spectrum — from a relatively basic sensitivity in simple creatures (e.g., earthworms) to more robust experience in so-called “higher” organisms (e.g., dolphins, chimpanzees).

Ultimately, however, there is a qualitative jump to humans who have second-order consciousness, what religious people refer to as “soul,” and what gives us the ability to think about our experiences — not simply experience them.

The question then becomes: what is the basis of this claim of sentience? Here we enter the philosophical quagmire known as “other minds.” We human beings actually have no really good test to determine if anyone is sentient. We assume that our fellow biological creatures are sentient because we know we are. That, along with our shared biology and shared behavioral reactions to things like pain and pleasure, allow us to assume we’re all sentient.

So what about machines? Many a test has been proposed to determine sentience in machines, the most famous being “The Turing Test,” delineated by Alan Turing, father of modern computing, in his seminal 1950 article, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” He proposed that when a human being can’t tell if he is talking to another human being or a machine, the machine can be said to have achieved human-like intelligence — i.e., accompanied with consciousness.

From a cursory reading of the interview that the Google engineer conducted with LaMDA, it seems relatively clear that the Turing Test has been passed. That said, numerous machines have passed the Turing Test over recent years — so many that most, if not all, researchers today do not believe passing the Turing Test demonstrates anything but sophisticated language processing, not consciousness. Furthermore, after tens of variations on the test have been developed to determine consciousness, philosopher Selmer Bringsjord declared, “Only God would know a priori, because his test would be direct and nonempirical.”

Setting aside the current media frenzy over LaMDA, how are we to approach this question of sentient AI? That is, given that engineering teams around the world have been working on “machine consciousness” since the mid-1990s, what are we to do if they achieve it? Or more urgently, should they even be allowed to achieve it? Indeed, ethicists claim that this question is more intractable than the question to permit the cloning of animals.

From a Jewish perspective, I believe a cogent answer to this moral dilemma can be gleaned from the following Talmudic vignette (Sanhedrin 65b), in which a rabbi appears to have created a sentient humanoid, or “gavra”:

Rava said: If the righteous desired it, they could create a world, for it is written, “But your iniquities have distinguished between you and God.” Rava created a humanoid (gavra) and sent him to R. Zeira. R. Zeira spoke to him but received no answer. Thereupon [R. Zeira] said to him: “You are a creature from my friend: Return to your dust.”

For R. Zeira, similar to Turing, the power of the soul (i.e., second-order consciousness) is expressed in a being’s ability to articulate itself. R. Zeira, unlike those who apply Turing’s test today, was able to discern a lack of soul in Rava’s gavra.

Despite R. Zeira’s rejection of the creature, some read in this story permission to create creatures with sentience — after all, Rava was a learned and holy sage, and would not have contravened Jewish law by creating his gavra.

But in context, the story at best expresses deep ambivalence about humans seeking to play God. Recall that the story begins with Rava declaring, “If the righteous desired it, they could create a world” — that is, a sufficiently righteous person could create a real human ( also known as “a complete world”). Rava’s failed attempt to do so suggests that he was either wrong in his assertion, or that he was not righteous enough. 

Some argue that R. Zeira would have been willing to accept a human-level humanoid. But a mystical midrash, or commentary, denies such a claim. In that midrash, the prophet Jeremiah — an embodiment of righteousness — succeeds in creating a human-level humanoid. Yet that very humanoid, upon coming to life, rebukes Jeremiah for making him! Clearly the enterprise of making sentient humanoids is being rejected — a cautionary tendency we see in the vast literature about golems, the inanimate creatures brought to life by rabbinic magic, which invariably run amok.

Space does not permit me to delineate all the moral difficulties entailed in the artificial creation of sentient beings. Suffice it to say that Jewish tradition sides with thought leaders like Joanna Bryson, who said, “Robot builders are ethically obliged to make robots to which robot owners have no ethical obligations.”

Or, in the words of R. Zeira, “Return to your dust.”

(JTA) — Jews looking for a rooting interest in the concluding games of this year’s NBA Finals might have one now, thanks to a head-turning wardrobe choice from Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry.

No, Curry isn’t Jewish. But during Friday’s Game 4 postgame press conference, following a Warriors victory, he did don a Hebrew sweatshirt for the cameras — one that matches his own Hebrew tattoos.

Eagle-eyed Twitter sleuth Emma Goss, a reporter at Jewish Telegraphic Agency partner J. The Jewish News of Northern California, caught the hoodie. It features the phrase “האהבה לא תבל לעולם אך”, which translates to “love never fails” — a reference to the New Testament passage 1 Corinthians 13:8 (though with the Hebrew letters written in the reverse order). It’s also one of Curry’s two Hebrew tattoos, which he shares with his wife. 

The sweatshirt also features an image of Curry’s wrist, visibly emblazoned with the same Hebrew tattoo. Curry’s second Hebrew tattoo is simply his last name rendered in Hebrew: “קרי”.

Curry’s fascination with the language might stem from his mother, Sonya Curry, who told reporters in 2015 that following a previous visit to Israel, she “was just transformed spiritually.” Sonya Curry, who also has a Hebrew tattoo, said she wanted to learn Hebrew because it is the language that Jesus spoke (more likely, he spoke Aramaic, although probably understood Hebrew), and added that she wanted to read the Torah in Hebrew.

Of course, a haphazardly translated New Testament phrase is hardly a gateway to meaningful Jewish wisdom. But the NBA Finals series between the Warriors and the Boston Celtics has other Jewish connections, too. 

For Boston, that includes Hall of Fame coach and executive Red Auerbach (who died in 2006), the son of a Russian-Jewish immigrant who is generally considered the greatest coach in the history of basketball. 

For the Warriors, there’s Jewish-Ukrainian immigrant and fellow Hall of Fame coach Eddie Gottlieb (who died in 1979), who played a leading role in bringing the team to the Bay Area from Philadelphia. 

Two of the NBA’s biggest awards are named after these two Jewish basketball pioneers. The league’s Rookie of the Year award confers the Eddie Gottlieb Trophy, while the Coach of the Year receives the Red Auerbach Trophy.

Curry’s Warriors lead the Celtics three games to two heading into Thursday night’s Game 6. If the Warriors win, it will be the team’s fourth championship since 2015.

(JTA) — As an avid book collector who operates an independent Jewish press, Larry Yudelson was excited to learn that a new, annotated version of the Mishnah, the earliest compendium of Oral Torah, was on its way.

Then he found out how much it would cost.

“At this stage, I’m not going to go out and buy a copy,” Yudelson said.

That’s because Oxford University Press set the price of the three-volume set, out in August, at $645 — a steep, though not unheard-of cost for an academic text, and among the most expensive of its own offerings.

“That was a huge disappointment,” Hayim Lapin, a professor of Jewish studies at the University of Maryland and a co-editor on the project, said about the price. “Unfortunately, we had no say in that calculation.”

Oxford University Press explained the price in an email to JTA: “As an expansive and ambitious three-volume scholarly enterprise, intended as the definitive edition of the founding text of rabbinic Judaism, it is expensive to produce and involves significant investment in copy-editing, proofreading, typesetting, and printing.”

Oxford said a lower-cost version could still be released in the future, and the authors hope this might happen next year. Still, the surprise price tag points to the complicated role that academic publishing plays in the creation of Jewish texts: University-affiliated presses publish works that otherwise could never command a massive popular audience, but their price points can be prohibitive to average readers.

“The academic price is good at the library, but it’s not really good for the beit midrash,” Yudelson said, referring to Jewish study halls. “And I think there are a lot of batei midrash where they would be welcome these days.”

Doctoral students and rabbis who were otherwise excited about the book balked at the price on Twitter. But the authors suggested the target audience — at least for now — is specialists for whom an explicated Mishnah would be an essential tool.

“My ideal audience would be a professor of New Testament,” said Shaye Cohen, a co-editor of the project. “I kept on thinking about academics who are very bright, very learned, have worked on related questions, but for whom the Mishnah is fundamentally a closed text because there’s nothing out there.”

Lapin, Cohen and a third scholar, Robert Goldenberg, set out more than a decade ago to create a text that would be accessible for scholars who are not fluent in Mishnaic Hebrew or Aramaic. (Goldenberg, who was a professor of history and Judaic studies at Stony Brook University, died in 2021, before the project was finished.) Over time, they collected contributions from 51 scholars with extensive knowledge of the technical language unique to the Mishnah, which was compiled in present-day Israel at the end of the second century CE.

“If you ever looked at [the] Mishnah, you will know instantly how hard and difficult it is,” said Cohen, the Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy at Harvard University. “The language I like to use is ‘lapidary.’ It needs you to come in there with a chisel and start banging on it. And then you can sort of shape it into something that you can understand. But if you just pick it up and start to read it, you have no idea what it’s talking about.”

Nevertheless, the study of classical Jewish texts is not just for specialists, and is central to the practice of many observant Jews, both clergy and laypeople. And building a Jewish library is an investment: While the Oxford Mishnah doesn’t have a direct competitor, other editions of the Mishnah can cost nearly $300. A full set of the Babylonian Talmud, which includes both the Mishnah and the expansive commentary known as Gemara, can cost upwards of $2,000. The Jewish Publication Society’s five-volume commentary on the Five Books of Moses sells for $360, or $75 per volume.

“In general, pricing has two main factors,” Yudelson explained. “Production costs, which includes page count, and comparable titles, which shows what the market will bear.”

Some of the most aggressive experiments in access carry no price tag at all. Sefaria, which launched in 2011, is an online, open-source library of Jewish texts that includes free versions of the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible), Mishnah, Talmud, classical commentaries, prayers and other texts, as well as many of their English translations. But Sefaria is a crowdsourced endeavor, which has its own limitations, and not all of its Mishnah commentaries are translated or annotated with explanations of technical terms. (Daniel Septimus, Sefaria’s CEO, is on the board of 70 Faces Media, JTA’s parent company.)

“Sefaria is an immensely useful tool,” Cohen said. “And I salute them and I’m delighted for them. However, our Mishnah project has, I would say, higher quality control.”

“Everybody in my project has a PhD,” he added. “They’re academics and academic institutions. They teach rabbinic texts for a living.”

Now that the annotated Mishnah is finished, Cohen says he may turn to Sefaria to discuss “whether the two projects could live with each other or work with each other.” But in the end, Oxford owns the copyright.

The new set isn’t the first time Oxford University Press has taken on the Mishnah. In the 1930s, it published Anglican priest Herbert Danby’s first-ever English translation of the Mishnah. Danby was also notable for his writing on Christian-Jewish relations and used his position as a professor at Oxford to defend against antisemitic attacks on the Talmud from Nazi leader Alfred Rosenberg.

Danby’s version, while translated, was not annotated and does not include explanations of technical terms, which is what Cohen, Lapin and Goldenberg’s Mishnah sets out to do.

“I’ve tried to convince Oxford that this can be another Herbert Danby if they market it correctly, they price it correctly, they pitch it correctly,” Cohen said. “I think this also might live for the next 70 years, until our successors will redo it.”

BERLIN (JTA) — A one-man effort to remove a medieval anti-Jewish sculpture from public view in Germany has failed.

The Federal Supreme Court in Karlsruhe announced Tuesday that the St. Marien Church in Wittenberg does not have to remove the “Judensau” — Jew Sow — sculpture from its façade, since the church administration had adequately distanced itself from the original antisemitic intention.

The Judensau is a Christian folk image dating back to the Middle Ages that depicts Jews suckling on the teats of a pig, peering into its anus, or, in the case of the Wittenberg relief, both.

Michael Duellmann, who is Jewish and has pressed the case in lower courts, is vowing to take his fight to the next level, to Germany’s highest court of human rights. These sculptures are “much more than merely insulting,” he said in a phone interview. “They are an inducement to murder.”

Placed inside or on the façade of churches, the statues were intended to teach lessons about sin and virtue. The relief in Wittenberg, which dates from the year 1290, is perched about 13 feet up on the church façade. The town is famous as the place where Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation began in the 15th century.

Duellmann, 79,  had demanded that the sandstone relief be removed because it was defamatory to himself and to Judaism overall. After losing his case in district court and on appeal, he took it to Germany’s highest criminal and civil court two years ago, where he lost.

Duellmann’s options now include taking the case to the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, which deals with human rights-related cases, attorney Ludwig Benecke told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. The basis for such a suit would be that such sculptures “insult the dignity of the human being,” which is against German Basic Law.

Speaking for the Lichtenfels-based law firm that has advised Duellmann throughout the process, Benecke explained it might be necessary to engage an attorney with experience in arguing cases before the Constitutional Court.

The process could take a lot of time, he said, but “I think [Duellmann] has enough energy to push it through.”

Should the Constitutional Court fail to take it on, the case could be brought to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, or the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Benecke said.

In delivering the verdict Tuesday, the court’s presiding judge, Stephan Seiters, said there was no “present infringement” of Duellmann’s civil rights, since the church had already installed an explanatory plaque, publicly and clearly distancing itself from the original antisemitic intentions.

In a statement issued Tuesday, the Central Council of Jews in Germany said it was disappointed in the decision.

The explanatory display does not “unambiguously condemn the anti-Jewish sculpture,” Josef Schuster, head of the Central Council, said. To really distance itself, “the church would have to clearly acknowledge its own guilt and condemn its centuries-long anti-Judaism” — something Schuster said he hoped this and other churches in Germany would finally do. 

“The defamation of Jews by the churches must be a thing of the past,” he said.

The sculptures should come down all together, Charlotte Knobloch, former chair of the Central Council and longtime head of the Jewish community in Munich and Upper Bavaria, said in a press statement Tuesday.

“I had very much hoped for a different decision,” Knobloch added. “As the presiding judge himself has already said, this relief is ‘anti-Semitism chiseled in stone.’”

Duellmann told JTA that while he was disappointed in the verdict, he was pleased that his public challenge sparked conversation about historical and modern antisemitism in Germany.

There are an estimated 40 Judensau sculptures in Germany, the oldest dating to the 13th century. Most are found in the form of reliefs or gargoyles. The earliest versions were placed inside where Jews would not see them, but eventually churches also placed them outside. 

(New York Jewish Week) — Rabbi Michelle Dardashti never planned on moving to Brooklyn.

The daughter of a cantor and raised in Los Angeles and Baltimore, Dardashti has been working as the associate chaplain at Brown University and Rabbi at Brown Rhode Island School of Design Hillel since 2013. Feeling at home in Providence, Rhode Island, she had found her dream job working with a diverse, challenging, pluralistic group of energetic young people.

But her husband, Nathan Sher, was commuting back and forth to New York City four days a week — a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Providence. What’s more, the local Jewish day school ended after fifth grade, and the couple wanted a Jewish education for their three children, ages 12, 10 and 6.

Meanwhile, in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, the rabbinic search committee at the historic Kane Street Synagogue was preparing to enter its second year of searching for a rabbi. In 2021, Rabbi Samuel Weintraub retired after 25 years at the synagogue. The committee had already had other finalists fall through and was getting desperate to find someone who would breathe life back into the congregation and revitalize the community after slogging through the slow pandemic years.

“Like many organizations, we have silos of different groups and we wanted someone who could bring those together and make everyone feel like they’re part of one community,” said Andrea Glick, who was the co-chair of the rabbinic search committee.

Dardashti and her husband had by this time decided to spend a year in Jerusalem. But when a friend reached out, asking if she would consider looking at the questionnaire the rabbinic search committee had prepared.

“We were pretty sure we were going to Jerusalem. But I said, ‘Sure, I’ll explore it,’” Dardashti explained. “It was shocking. I checked out their questionnaire and I spoke to their search committee chairs and I was like, ‘This feels amazing.’”

Dardashti met with the search committee in late January, and by early March, an announcement went out to the community announcing her appointment as senior rabbi. She begins her tenure on August 1.

“It was quite a feeling of bashert-ness,” she added, using a Yiddish word meaning “fated.” “As much as we were excited to go to Jerusalem, my husband and I felt like this was an opportunity that felt so right — to us and to them — that we couldn’t let it pass us by.”

Dardashti, 41, will rely on her experience at Brown RISD Hillel —  where she started the Narrow Bridge Project, a program that allows Jewish students from all political leanings to discuss the past, present and future of Judaism and Zionism — to build a strong community base at Kane Street. Calling herself a “radical pluralist,” she stressed the importance of living and working in a place that embraces more than one kind of Judaism. Dardashti walks the walk when it comes to pluralism: Ordained as a Conservative rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary, she belonged to both a Modern Orthodox synagogue and a Conservative one in Providence, and often attended a Renewal minyan as well.

A number of factors at Kane Street drew Dardashti in, including the potential of current staff — a new executive director and liturgical director both started in 2019, joining Rabbi Valerie Lieber, who has been directing the Hebrew school at Kane Street for more than a decade. “I’m thrilled to be joining such a talented cadre of Brooklyn rabbinical and cantorial colleagues,” Dardashti said.

“They really seemed to have been through an introspective process, where they understood that they need to hold on to a lot of what has made Kane Street Kane Street forever and continue to hold tight to certain traditions and to the strong spirit of lay leadership that they’ve had, but also figure out how to leverage all of that to move forward,” she added.

Kane Street Synagogue in Cobble Hill is known as “The Mother Synagogue” of Brooklyn — the oldest Jewish congregation serving the Brooklyn neighborhood in which it was founded, with roots dating back to 1856. (Ramin Talaie)

As for Kane Street, the feeling among the rabbinic committee is relief — and genuine excitement.

“Finding Rabbi Dardashti was kind of a spiritual moment in and of itself,” said Danny Tamman, who served as a member of rabbinic search committee and has been a member of the synagogue for 10 years, along with his wife and three daughters. “With regards to her spirituality, her effusiveness, and her outgoing nature, she makes an impact. It’s precisely what the synagogue needs right now.”

The committee was also looking for a leader who was passionate about teaching and leading prayer. “We felt like our services needed some new energy and new thinking,” Glick added. “Our DNA is people who really want to learn about Judaism who really want to deepen their knowledge, and we wanted to reinvigorate that.”

In the last few decades, changing demographics of Brownstone Brooklyn and Kane Street have meant the congregation is aiming to embrace “Jews-by-choice (converts), interfaith families, Jews who are returning to their roots, and Jews re-discovering their faith and culture” as well as LGBTQ members, per their website.

According to Glick, Kane Street serves a spectrum of ages and religious affiliations. However, “the one group we don’t have is people in their 20s,” she said. It was important to Kane Street to have a leader that could speak to every group.

“When I talk about silos, I mean that sometimes the young parents are all together and sometimes the older people are together and then there’s the people who go to shul every Shabbat,” Glick explained. “People often gravitate toward other people like them. But we wanted someone who can give us all a sense of being part of one community.”

Kane Street has roots dating back to 1856, when it became known as “The Mother Synagogue of Brooklyn” — the oldest Jewish congregation serving the Brooklyn neighborhood in which it was founded. The congregation moved to its current building in 1905. In the 1960s and ’70s, as core members moved to the suburbs, Kane Street shifted its practices to serve the changing demographics of the neighborhood, such as embracing more women in leadership roles. Nominally Orthodox in practice, the congregation began to align itself with the more liberal Conservative movement. Rabbi Debra Cantor became the congregation’s first woman rabbi in 1988.

Tamman, who grew up attending a Sephardic synagogue in the United Kingdom, said that Kane Street is facing a similar turning point today. Membership is changing, Brooklyn’s Jewish community is becoming more diverse, and Kane Street wanted to find a rabbi that could meet the shifting needs of the greater Brooklyn community.

“Almost every shul in the country has the same challenge: to figure out how to be the beating heart of the community,” said Joey Weisenberg, who served as the synagogue’s musical director from 2007 to 2014 and who returns every year to lead High Holiday services. “One of the ways Kane Street has survived for so long is by deliberating carefully and changing slowly, but still responding in real time to the concerns of the community and creating a sense of pulsing energy.”

Weisenberg, who called Dardashti’s appointment as senior rabbi a “great shidduch” (match), said he felt a generational shift happening as members who revitalized the community in the 1970s pass the baton to younger members.

Dardashti has worked as a congregational pulpit rabbi before, although never as a senior rabbi. After her ordination in 2010, she was a Marshall T. Meyer Fellow at B’nai Jeshurun, the powerhouse synagogue on the Upper West Side. “There’s nothing that I could imagine that would be so wonderful to get to do starting out as a rabbi. It was such invaluable training,” she recalled of the experience. She then worked as the director of community engagement at Temple Beth El in Stamford, Connecticut, before beginning her dual appointment at Brown University and Brown RISD Hillel.

Growing up, Dardashti had no plans to become a rabbi, although she was deeply steeped in her family’s eclectic Jewish identity. Raised by singers — her father from Iran and her mother from Queens — the Dardashti family performed as a singing group at Jewish festivals and institutions throughout her childhood. (Her sister, Galeet Dardashti, leads the all-woman Mizrahi/Sephardi ensemble Divahn, and her father is Hazzan Emeritus at Beth El Synagogue Center in New Rochelle, NY.)

“I grew up surrounded by and learning to present a Judaism that was compelling, a Judaism that was meta-denominational, multicultural, musical and connected to justice,” Dardashti said.

After graduating from Binghamton University, Dardashti moved to Uruguay, where she freelanced for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (the New York Jewish Week’s sister site) and volunteered at a local Hillel. While deferring from her planned path of going to law school, she lived in Israel as part of the Dorot Fellowship and the Nesiya Institute, training programs for budding Diaspora Jewish leaders.

At Kane Street Synagogue, she looks forward to building community with those who sometimes find themselves on the fringes of congregational communities.

Of course, the move to the tree-lined streets of Brownstone Brooklyn was also a huge draw for Dardashti and her family. “There’s just so much going on Jewishly, artistically, intellectually and spiritually,” she said. “I love not being the only exciting thing going on Jewishly, and I love the idea of being able to collaborate and build and dream in a playground of so much bounty and such fabulous clergy colleagues.”

“[Brooklyn] is vibrant, alive, and oozing with potential. There are so many interesting and interested Jews,” she added.

Reaching out to as-of-yet unaffiliated Brooklyn Jews is one of Kane Street’s goals. “There are a lot of people in Brooklyn who are not connected to Judaism in any formal way. We think a lot of those people would really like Kane Street, so we wanted someone who could reach those people as well,” Glick explained.

For Tamman, it was Dardashti’s ability to make Judaism accessible to anyone that made her the right fit for Kane Street going forward. “Whether you’re Jewish or haven’t been very involved, if you have roots in the neighborhood or are thinking about having kids here, we wanted to have a place for you here at the synagogue,” he said.

Dardashti plans to create that place. “This job at Kane Street feels like a fantastic fit. It feels like the perfect moment, location and role for me at this stage of my career and my family’s stage of life,” she said.

(JTA) – The fighting in Ukraine has been called “a WhatsApp war” amid widespread reliance on messaging apps by journalists, soldiers and ordinary civilians, and their central role in spreading propaganda. 

Meanwhile, WhatsApp’s inventor, a Ukrainian-born Jew whose creation made him one of the wealthiest people in the world, has kept conspicuously quiet throughout the conflict. Jan Koum, who controls a multi-billion-dollar charitable foundation, has not uttered a public word even as many other wealthy Ukrainians and Russians announce donations toward humanitarian relief efforts. 

But based on an examination of tax returns filed by Koum’s foundation before the war, the publicity-shy WhatsApp founder, who arrived in California as a teenager, is more entwined than meets the eye with the events rocking the country he left behind as a 16-year-old. His donations, only a sliver of which have been previously reported, include tens of millions of dollars to Jewish organizations now involved in relief efforts in Eastern Europe. 

For example, from 2019 to 2020, the latest year for which there is a tax return, the Koum Family Foundation donated about $17 million to the European Jewish Association, an organization headquartered in Brussels that launched a campaign in March to provide housing, food and clothing to refugees from the war. Nearly all of the group’s 2019 budget came from Koum. 

With $10.6 million in gifts over that same period, Koum’s foundation is also one of the most significant donors to another group involved in relief efforts: the Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS. The group, whose name refers to the Commonwealth of Independent States, an association of former Soviet territories, announced the establishment of an ambulance fleet to evacuate patients throughout Ukraine. 

It is unknown whether Koum continued to make donations in 2021 and afterward because his foundation and all of the past grantees contacted by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency have either ignored requests for comment or declined to speak on the record. JTA contacted more than a dozen of the nonprofits, several of which said they were prohibited from publicly acknowledging Koum’s giving as a condition of their gift. 

Due to the secrecy marking his charitable giving, as well as his personal life, Koum’s profile as a philanthropist over the past several years has gone almost unnoticed. However, tax returns reveal that Koum, with a fortune estimated between $9.8 billion and $13.7 billion, has quietly become one of the largest donors to Jewish causes in the world. 

His foundation gave nearly $140 million from 2019 to 2020 to about 70 Jewish charities working in the United States, Eastern Europe and Israel. That’s on par with the rate of giving by the biggest and best-known donors in the Jewish world, such as Tulsa-based Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, whose imprint is on hundreds of Jewish organizations, including JTA. 

At this level of giving, Koum has an outsized impact on Jewish communal life but without any of the public awareness that often accompanies major philanthropy. 

That Koum has been able to operate under the radar isn’t surprising to Lila Corwin Berman, a professor of American Jewish history at Temple University, who writes about philanthropy. 

“We have a system in place that guards the privacy of donors and requires minimal forms of reporting and oversight,” she said. ”Only by knowing the Koum name can I excavate tax records to see the list of grantees — and this assumes that the foundation disburses all of its gifts directly, without using community foundations as pass-throughs. The rules as they exist appear to value the donor’s privacy and autonomy above the public’s knowledge.”

Transparency about funding should be particularly important when it comes to Jewish nonprofits because of their goal of “stitchi[ing] together the broad diversity of Jewish life,” according to Corwin Berman.

“The Jewish public should care because such a large funder can inevitably sculpt and set communal priorities,” she said. 

The European Jewish Association, for example, is led by a Chabad-affiliated rabbi, and the Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS counts Berel Lazar, a major Chabad rabbi who leads Russia’s Jewish community, as a director. Koum has also given to several Chabad congregations in California and other organs of the movement.

One of Koum’s top Chabad-linked grantees is a nonprofit known as the Jewish Community Center of Moscow, whose address leads to a brown-brick residential building in Brooklyn, a few minutes’ walk away from Chabad’s global headquarters in Crown Heights. 

The organization has no website, and since it is classified as a religious organization, the Jewish Community Center of Moscow is exempt from filing paperwork detailing its mission, leadership or financial activity, as is required of other types of nonprofits. But a review of IRS records suggests that a typical donation to the organization ranged from $15,000-$55,000 for a number of years until, in 2019, the pattern changed. That’s when the Koum foundation gave the nonprofit $3.3 million. In 2020, it gave $5.7 million. 

No one reached by JTA would speak on the record about Koum’s motivations, but Chabad is popular among Jews who grew up in the former Soviet Union.

“In their outreach, mode of operations and philosophy Chabad have been very welcoming and helpful to Russian-speaking Jews,” said Misha Galperin, a consultant to donors and charities and the president of the National Museum of American Jewish History, who grew up in the Soviet Union. 

Galperin said this affinity exists despite the lack of religious observance among many Jews from the former Soviet Union. 

“Most Jews from the former Soviet Union are not observant, and they’re not particularly interested in following the commandments in the way that Chabad understands them,” he said. “But they [Chabad] look like Jews — in other religions, you might think of priests and imams as having a uniform. In Judaism, it’s [Chabad] Lubavitch and other Hasidim who have a look. So many Russian-speaking Jews think of Chabad as ‘my synagogue that I won’t go to.’”

Joshua Tapper, a historian of Soviet Jewry who has written about Chabad’s success with this demographic, said the movement offers an appealing message for people whose Jewish identity was suppressed by Soviet authorities. 

“Chabad’s rhetoric is that ‘our movement was born here, we survived many decades underground, in the Soviet wilderness, getting by on our wits and our religious fervor and belief in God, and now we’ve reclaimed our rightful place as the leader of Russian-speaking Jewry,’” said Tapper, who is a graduate student at Stanford University and former reporter for JTA. 

Koum’s donations are not limited to Chabad or even to religious groups. He is also a major supporter of the Israeli healthcare system with gifts to Hadassah and to the U.S. fundraising affiliates of various Israeli hospitals. 

He also donates millions to Jewish institutions in the San Francisco Bay Area, such as the Oshman Family Jewish Community Center in Silicon Valley. Tax records also reveal that he is the previously anonymous donor behind a new $3.5 million center for the Russian-speaking Jewish community of San Francisco.

At least a few of his donations reflect his right-wing political views on Israel. Donations of $600,000 went to the Maccabee Task Force Foundation, an organization founded by the late Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson to support Israel advocacy on college campuses. The foundation has also given $6 million to Friends of Ir David, the American fundraising arm of Elad, a group trying to expand Jewish settlement in parts of largely Arab East Jerusalem, and $175,000 to the Central Fund of Israel, which has been accused of supporting violent extremists in Israel.

The Koum foundation’s only major non-Jewish gifts have gone to two universities: $1 million to Fordham in 2020 and some $41 million to Stanford since 2017. His affinity for these institutions is somewhat surprising considering that the only university Koum has attended is San Jose State University, from which he dropped out to focus on his first major job in tech, at Yahoo. 

Koum’s story is a real-life rags-to-riches tale of an immigrant who came to the United States with nothing, sought to improve his lot, worked hard and became fabulously wealthy as he developed a product used by billions of people every day. Since he has granted very few interviews, most of what’s known about his life can be gleaned from only a few sources, most notably a profile by Forbes penned as he and his partners sold WhatsApp to Facebook for $22 billion in 2014.

A previously unreported lawsuit filed against Koum in Los Angeles by a former employee at one of his mega-mansions last year helps fill in the years since the acquisition and following Koum’s departure from Facebook in 2018. It reflects an account of Koum as a hoarder of some of the most expensive homes in California and a zealous protector of his own privacy. 

Koum was raised on the outskirts of Kyiv in the town Fastiv, which happened to be shelled by Russian forces early in the current war. 

In 1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union and amid political turmoil and antisemitic tension, a teen-aged Koum his mother immigrated to Mountain View, California, and began living in a two-bedroom apartment made available through public assistance. His father stayed behind and died in 1997. 

They relied on food stamps as his mom earned money babysitting and Koum swept the floors of a grocery store for work. His mom was soon diagnosed with cancer, entitling the family to disability payments for a while. She died in 2000, leaving Koum an orphan at 24.

His self-education in computer networking brought him into contact with the emerging startup world in Silicon Valley, and he eventually went to work for Yahoo with his future WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton. The two bonded over their shared no-nonsense attitude. “Neither of us has an ability to bullshit,” Acton told Forbes. 

The duo left Yahoo in 2007 to take a sabbatical, which was spent traveling South America and playing Ultimate Frisbee. In a twist that would prove ironic, they each applied to work at Facebook but were rejected.

In 2009, the iPhone had only recently been launched, and the App Store was only seven months old. Koum saw opportunity in this new mobile frontier and he began brainstorming ideas with members of the Russian-speaking community of San Jose. Forbes describes long conversations about WhatsApp over tea between Koum and Alex Fishman, a graduate of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, who played host to the community at his apartment in San Jose. 

Within two years of WhatsApp’s launch, it was among the most downloaded apps in the still-nascent world of apps, offering free, encrypted texts, phone calls, videos and other content. The company remained on a steep growth curve and by early 2013, WhatsApp had 200 million active users and a staff of 50.

The scrappy startup, operating out of a low-profile building without so much as a logo in sight, caught the attention of Mark Zuckerberg. After a protracted courtship, Zuckerberg got Koum and Acton to agree to a sale, and Facebook bought WhatsApp for $22 billion in cash and stock in 2014. On Koum’s initiative, the three signed the deal while standing outside the building that formerly housed the welfare agency where Koum received food stamps. 

Koum stayed on with the company, joining Facebook’s board of directors, but in 2018 he announced he was stepping down. The Washington Post reported that Koum left over Facebook’s increasingly lax privacy practices.

The window into Koum’s thinking narrowed at this time because of his lack of engagement with the press, but the billionaire did communicate some of his thoughts on Facebook to roughly 90,000 people following his posts. He was sharing links to pro-Trump and anti-immigration articles and expressed a hardline pro-Israel stance. Eventually, he all but stopped posting to social media. 

It’s largely a mystery how Koum spends his time nowadays. For a campaign donation made last year, the 46-year-old Koum declared his occupation as “retired.” 

He is known to own six enormous mansions in the Silicon Valley enclave of Atherton and in Malibu, at least two of which are worth something close to $100 million.

He established a company for the sole purpose of operating these properties, according to a lawsuit by a former employee of the company named Carina Walker. In 2019, she was hired at an annual salary of $100,000 to maintain the landscaping at just one of these properties, in Malibu. About three months later, she was fired. Walker soon sued Koum, claiming he dismissed her because her disability and medical condition in violation of anti-discriminatory protections.

According to the lawsuit, Koum is averse to the sight of hired help. “[W]henever it was determined that Koum would arrive at one of his properties, his employees were forced to scramble off whichever property Koum was visiting in order to avoid being seen by him,” the lawsuit says. 

The year Koum sold WhatsApp he transferred $556 million to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a charity that distributes money on behalf of donors. It’s unknown where this money may have gone. But the following year, Koum established his own foundation, and a small view into Koum’s affairs opened up. 

He seeded the foundation with hundreds of millions of dollars in Facebook stock, building toward an endowment that was valued at more than $2 billion in 2020. Although tax returns detailing his giving are not yet available past that year, the legal requirement that a foundation dispense at least 5% of its assets each year suggests that his charitable donations have only ramped up since. 

Koum’s devotion to funding Chabad and other Jewish groups became increasingly apparent starting in the foundation’s 2018 tax returns. 

Aside from the earlier pro-Israel statements, he didn’t have much of a public Jewish identity, so the disclosure of these donations would seem to come out of nowhere. 

But Koum’s adventures in philanthropy continue a tradition of giving by Jews from the former Soviet Union, as well as a recent wave of philanthropy driven by new wealth in the community. 

Lena Katsnelson, the director of UJA FSU, the division of UJA-Federation of New York focused on Jews of the former Soviet Union, noted there’s a history of more than 30 years of charitable giving by this community. 

Galperin, meanwhile, noted that Koum isn’t the only donor in what he characterizes as a wave of Russian-speaking Jews who have become wealthy in tech and other sectors. He gave the examples of Russian-born Eugene Fooksman, who joined WhatsApp early to work as a software engineer, and founded a foundation that made some $1.1 million in donations in 2020, and Max Levchin, a co-founder of PayPal, who was born in Ukraine and makes donations to various Jewish causes but not through a dedicated foundation. 

“This generation took its time to settle down, develop the means and the interests to become philanthropists,” Galperin said, 

He added that among all Jews, this group has a particular history that primes many to donate to Jewish causes above all else. 

“That’s because for many of them, the act of leaving the Soviet Union and coming to whether it’s Israel or the United States or Canada, have a lot to do with their Jewish identity,” he said.

Jacob Henry contributed reporting to this story. 

(JTA) — Israel’s education ministry has suspended school trips to Poland amid disputes with authorities there, possibly cancelling plans to have 7,000 students visit former death camps this summer.

The ministry’s statement Tuesday cited disagreements with Polish authorities over security for the trips — a possible reference to an issue involving armed guards accompanying the delegations.

But on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid cited disagreements between Israelis and Poles on how to talk about the Holocaust as one reason “jeopardizing school trips,” Haaretz reported.

“The Poles wanted to determine what is allowed and what’s not allowed to tell Israeli children traveling to Poland. We will not agree to this,” the newspaper quoted Lapid as saying.

The disagreements, he added, are connected to a law passed in Poland in 2020 that made it illegal to blame the Polish nation for Nazi crimes. Israel protested the law, which some Holocaust scholars warned would limit free speech and academic research on collaboration with the Nazis by thousands of Poles.

“Part of the implications of this legislation is the fact that the Poles wanted a say in the content given to the delegations. It certainly jeopardizes the trips of this summer. It’s a decision made by the education minister originally but clearly this has diplomatic consequences,” Lapid said.

A Polish government spokesperson confirmed to Haaretz that Poland wishes to change the content on school trips at Auschwitz and other concentration, death camps and heritage sites connected to World War II and the Nazi occupation of Poland.

Poland is asking Israel to teach about the Holocaust “with a wider historical perspective” free of “negative stereotypes about Poland and Poles,” Haaretz quoted the spokesperson as saying. “We want to increased the participation of Polish figures in preparing the groups and during the visits to the heritage sites, including through the engagement of Polish guides.”

(JTA) – David Brog has overseen pro-Israel organizations with significant Republican backing for more than two decades, but his own attempt to make inroads for himself as a GOP candidate fell short Tuesday in Nevada.

Brog lost his Republican Congressional primary race in the state’s 1st district to former Army colonel Mark Robertson, in a spirited eight-way race to represent the GOP in what’s likely to be a competitive general election for the recently redrawn Las Vegas-area district. Brog finished with just over 17 percent of the vote, a distant second to Robertson’s commanding 30 percent.

The Jewish director of the campus Zionist group Maccabee Task Force, which opposes the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel, Brog is the former longtime director of the powerhouse Evangelical Zionist group Christians United for Israel. In addition to his pro-Israel bona fides, Brog had connections to Nevada’s most powerful Jewish family: Casino magnate and major pro-Israel donor Sheldon Adelson, who died in 2021, and his wife Miriam were major backers of the Maccabee Task Force, and Brog is often considered an Adelson protege.

But how much support Brog’s own campaign actually had from the Adelson family is unclear. Jewish Insider reported that there were no FEC records of Miriam Adelson donating to Brog’s campaign (though a super PAC with unnamed backers did support him). Brog himself was a relative newcomer to Nevada, having previously lived in Texas.

Brog had the endorsement of a major figure in former President Donald Trump’s orbit, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, but he did not have the official Nevada GOP endorsement, which instead went to also-defeated candidate Carolina Serrano.

Robertson, who is Mormon, is also a member of the Republican Jewish Coalition leadership council, and called himself “very supportive” of Israel and a proponent of “Judeo-Christian values” during the campaign. He strongly opposed the Iranian nuclear deal reached under President Obama.

(New York Jewish Week) — The New York County Supreme Court ruled that Yeshiva University must recognize a campus LGBTQ pride group.

Judge Lynn Kotler directed the Modern Orthodox university to provide the YU Pride Alliance “full equal accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges afforded to all other student groups at Yeshiva University.”

Tuesday’s decision caps a dispute that dates back at least to 2020, when seven LGBTQ student activists and allies filed a complaint with the New York City Commission on Human Rights charging the university with discrimination. Administrators had overruled a student government decision to recognize the gay pride group.

In her ruling, Kotler said that Y.U. is chartered as a non-religious organization and as a result is subject to New York City Human Rights Law.

In its court filings, Yeshiva University acknowledged that while it was incorporated as non-sectarian, it was guided by its religious beliefs. “The court’s ruling violates the religious liberty upon which this country was founded,” a Y.U. spokesperson told The Commentator, a campus newspaper.

Gay sex is forbidden by nearly all Orthodox interpretations of Jewish law, although attitudes toward individuals who identify as queer have eased somewhat in Modern Orthodox settings in recent years.

The Manhattan-based university intends to appeal the decision.

Jewish Queer Youth, a nonprofit representing the interests of gay Orthodox Jews, hailed the ruling as “a victory for human dignity, mental health and safety on campus,” Rachael Fried, executive director of JQY and a Y.U. alum, said in a statement.