(JTA) — As Jews across the United States and the world gather for the High Holidays beginning at sundown this Sunday, there are sure to be a handful of common themes emanating from the pulpit.

This year marks a third High Holiday season under the shadow of COVID-19. The war in Ukraine has raged for seven months. The United Kingdom’s long-reigning monarch recently died 70 years after being crowned. 

Suffice to say, there is no shortage of sermon fodder as the Jewish community ushers in a new Jewish year, 5783.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reached out to a geographically and denominationally diverse range of rabbis to ask for a glimpse of the messages they are sharing with their communities during these High Holidays.

Their responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Are you a rabbi with a message you’d like JTA readers to hear? Please reach out.

“The only antidote to fear is true faith”

Rabbi Rachel Isaacs, Beth Israel Congregation, Waterville, Maine

Fear can protect us and bring us to prayer in a spirit of healthy humility. However, when fear becomes a generalized anxiety that prevents us from enjoying and recognizing blessing around us, when fear causes us to live in constant suspicion of our neighbors and the purity of their intentions, when terror makes the world seem irredeemably dark — it becomes something dangerous. 

I do believe that there is another way — and not surprisingly — I believe the only antidote to that kind of fear is true faith. Not religious behavioralism, not religious judgment, but true faith in the goodness of God and Divine creation.

Rav Nachman of Breslov, writes famously in his book “Likutei Halachot” (interestingly enough in the context of the laws of shaving):

The core idea in the service of God is that a person should have no fear, as our rabbis (zichronam livrachah) taught us that in this world a person needs to walk on a very narrow bridge, and the most important thing is that this person should have no fear. The most important thing as a person is strengthening himself to walk across this narrow bridge in peace and without fear is the holy faith.

The most important thing as a person is strengthening herself to walk across this narrow bridge in peace and without fear is the holy faith. Faith in Judaism isn’t about submission or obedience to dogma. Emunah, or faith, means faithfulness — which is to say, staying in relationship with God and one another through the vicissitudes of life and the instability of our individual, fleeting emotions. What holds us steady through the creaking, dilapidated, shaking narrow bridge, is the fact that we are holding fast to one another and the God who created us, the God who created us to live in eternal community and to enjoy our fleeting days on this earth. This is how we suspend ourselves in space — through community and relationships we refuse to relinquish despite the disagreements, pain and misunderstandings that will inevitably emerge.

“What if our world was shattered and no one cared?”

Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, Temple Emanuel, Winston-Salem, North Carolina

When I was being held hostage on Jan. 15, I didn’t know about all of the vigils and all of love and all of the fear. I didn’t know until after we escaped that y’all were with us. So many of you were with us that day in Colleyville — waiting, hoping, praying, and ultimately rejoicing that we made it out alive.

Our rabbis teach: “Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bah zeh,” that all Jews are responsible for one another. The outpouring of emotion that you shared during our ordeal and in the aftermath embodied this principle. It overwhelmed us in the best of ways. I was eternally grateful for all the support and thought a lot about how it would feel to go through something like that and be met with silence. What if our world was shattered and no one cared?

The idea that we are all responsible for each other means that no one should ever have to feel that way. Being responsible for each other means that when we’re a part of a Jewish community that we never have to question whether we belong. Within our fractured communities, we often fall short of this ideal.

Elul is a time for personal and communal reflection. It’s a time for change. We seek healing in our lives and healing for our communities. Start with being responsible for each other. Live this value. We need you!

“Let us try again”

Rabbi Mira Rivera, Ammud Jews of Color Torah Academy

Jewish tradition gifted us with the month of Elul just before Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe. For a month we were invited into fields of memory for an accounting of the soul. The braver among us crossed minefields to go face to face with those whom we have wronged, or those who wronged us. 

The past, the flickering or frozen fields on screen and in our mind’s eye, was where we ran away from grief towards relief. Do we remember our essential workers? It seems so long ago. We thought we were tired. THEY were tired. Essential workers are still tired.

Remember the campaigns against intellectualism, against science, against breaking the silence? They are still happening. Some of us flee even in our dreams, chased we are by injustices committed on us, or by us.  

No cinematic slow motion here. No hair-swinging, sunlit-dappled, Muzak-underscored romp across the golden screen, but a national marathon where mouths open to an endless scream, but sometimes the sound cuts out. 

I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Let me try again. Let us try again with eyes, ears and arms wide open. Enter Tishrei, the month of new beginnings, return and atonement for our people. Oh, to be in Awe again!

“How must we learn and relearn to be close to one another?”

Rabbi Claudia Kreiman, Temple Beth Zion, Brookline, Massachusetts

For the past two and a half years, many of our relationships and interactions have centered on social distancing. Even during the hardest times of the pandemic, we found new ways to make connections, both spiritually and communally: drive-by birthday celebrations, morning minyans on Zoom, sharing messages of hope in our windows and on our sidewalks, and more. 

Now, as we “come back” as a community to celebrate these High Holidays and to be close to each other, both physically and spiritually, we will reflect together on what it means to be close. Close to each other, close to God, close to our synagogue community, close and fully present in the world. After the last two and a half years, how must we learn and relearn to be close to one another? How do we find closeness to God? How do we connect from a place of truth to find God’s presence in our lives? 

The verse that is guiding us is from Psalm 145, verse 18: “Karov Hashem l’chol korav, l’chol asher yikrau’hu v’emet” — Adonai is near to all who call, to all who call sincerely. 

The Hebrew word “karov,” which means near or close, is also related to the word “korban,” which means sacrifice or offering. In the ways that we come close, we also bring our own offerings to each other, to our communities, and to our society. During the High Holidays and this new year, we will reflect on the ways we do this: It is a call to show up, to find truth in the world, to bring justice and healing to this broken world. The High Holidays are such a gift of new possibilities, of change, of starting anew, of reflecting, of reconnecting. 

As we learn and relearn how to be close to one another this season, may we also learn and relearn how to bring our offerings to our communities. May it be a sweet and new year, a year where each and everyone can show up in it in the best ways possible to live meaningfully and to make this world a better place.

“Our society needs to learn to listen”

Rabbi Marc Katz, Temple Ner Tamid, Bloomfield, New Jersey

Our current moment is living through a new kind of idolatry, one as pernicious and dangerous as that found in the Torah.  

Idolatry is magnifying something other than God as the ultimate. Our ancestors did it with statues of stone and gold. Throughout history, idolatry has manifested in a myriad of ways: in exalting money, power, prestige, social standing. But I fear that we are at a point in our history where more than anything, the modern-day idolatry is found primarily in making our own ideologies into a kind of God. And this is true wherever you fall on the political spectrum. 

There are plenty of reasons why this has happened. Technology creates echo chambers where your own ideas are reinforced. We have grown unaccustomed to discomfort, a key ingredient to growth and thoughtful discourse. In the tension between our private wants and the public good, our society has turned toward the individual and away from the collective. Politics has replaced staples like religion as the convener of community and the central gathering point of people’s lives. And when politics function more like social clubs, where one gains entry by proving their fealty to a set of moral and legal prescriptions for our county, then policy positions are viewed as referenda on the integrity and character of the person holding them. 

To live an ethical life, one needs a certain degree of humility. He or she needs to understand that moral living is a fallible enterprise. On the one hand, we have to have rules. We have to make policy. We have to choose sides. Otherwise we will be crippled by our own inability to act. Yet, in making them, we cannot be so wed to our own regulations and requirements that we are unable to question them and pivot when we err. 

More than anything, our society needs to learn to listen, to digest, to think deeply, and to be willing to compromise. None of us are so smart as to have all the answers, and even when we do think we are right, there are plenty of reasons to compromise that too for some greater good. 

“This will be a time for all of us to think about what is important”

Rabbi Rachel Ain, Sutton Place Synagogue, New York, New York

The High Holidays are a unique opportunity. 

Over the course of the year, week in and week out, rabbis are often asked to respond to the news of the day and what Jewish tradition might say about it. So in thinking about the holidays this year and what my congregants needed to hear, I decided that I wanted to focus on the theme of wisdom. 

At a time where we often only get information in soundbites, I want to inspire those listening to realize that to approach life today with the many inputs coming at us, the holidays can be a time to think and listen and learn what is important to them as they give themselves the chance to press pause on the busy-ness of life and then re-start with the ability to make new commitments and improve on the past. 

So using Jewish tradition as the backdrop, my hope is to show that whether it is the wisdom within each of us, the wisdom learned from others, both with us and those who have passed, the wisdom of engaging with Israel, and even the wisdom of fear and failure, this will be a time for all of us to think about what is important. 

There is no question that the past two and a half years have changed us and our world, not only because of the pandemic but because of the many complex issues that have been a part of our news cycle. This doesn’t mean that by thinking about these existential or timeless questions around wisdom I am not aware of our world. I am. It is of course our world and the events within it that shape our daily lives. But I also believe that giving ourselves the time to think about our role in the world, our relationship with others, our own faith, and our identity beyond any given news cycle is a gift that I hope that everyone will take advantage of during these sacred days in order to be present for the year ahead. 

“Let us not wait until someone dies to discover the true love in our relationship”

Rabbi Asher Lopatin, Jewish Community Relations Council/AJC, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan

Sacrifice, but meaning, comes with a life of service and duty. That is one reason why we read the Binding of Isaac every morning — if we get to synagogue early enough — because it shows us the legacy that a life of sacrifice and service leads to.

So on the one hand, Queen Elizabeth II gave us a model for our own lives, and yet, she also in a strange way embodied a metaphor for our relationship with God:

The queen’s life was one of being a sovereign of the people (with even the prime minister bowing before her) but also a servant of the people. And that is what people really felt: that she ruled over them and served them as the ruler. My friend says that in business there is the concept of the “servant leader.” So it is fascinating that Hashem, too, is our sovereign whom we serve and worship and bow to, but also, in many ways, there is an element of God being in service of the Jewish people. After all, God sticks with us and compromises the model of perfection in order to be our leader. God forgives us, God gets angry with us, God commits to being with us through thick and thin. God our sovereign in a strange way is committed to serving the people He loves.

The relationship of the people to the queen, like the Jewish people to God, is one of both fear — awe — and, as we see at this time of her passing, great love. Ultimately, the Rambam and others say the ideal is a relationship of love and not fear. So let us not wait until someone dies to discover the true love in our relationship. And let us make sure that our relationship with God is filled with love.

(JTA) — One of the centerpieces of the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur liturgy is the “Avinu Malkeinu” prayer — Our Father, Our King. It’s a desperate and emotional appeal for forgiveness, set to powerful melodies over the centuries. 

It’s also a hurdle for many people, regular and occasional synagogue-goers alike. Some can’t relate to a “king,” or bristle at the gendered implications of “father.” Whatever they hoped to feel or achieve in prayer is undermined by the archaic language and metaphors that don’t speak to them.

That’s the challenge described in Rabbi Toba Spitzer’s new book, “God Is Here: Reimagining the Divine.” The spiritual leader of Congregation Dorshei Tzedek in Newton, Mass., Spitzer understands how the language of Jewish prayer can stand in the way of the meaningful spiritual experience many people are seeking. Her solution is to “dislodge” unhelpful metaphors of prayer and look for meaning in different ones — ancient and modern — in ways that help people think and talk about “something that is greater than ourselves.”

The book asks what might be useful if we were to think of God as water, or fire, or a place, or yes, even a king. All are metaphors for God found in the Torah and the Jewish prayer book. You don’t need to ask whether you believe that God is a parent or a monarch, she says, but rather explore where the poetry of metaphor can take you. “My hope,” she writes, “is that we can recapture the alive-ness which once pervaded our holy texts, and reconstruct our metaphors so that they are once again engaging and meaningful.”

Spitzer is the past president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association — the first LGBTQ rabbi to head a national rabbinic organization. She spoke with me via Zoom.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity

Jewish Telegraphic Agency: It’s the High Holidays. People find themselves in a synagogue for the first time all year, where even regular synagogue-goers face that firehose of liturgical language that may not speak to them. For both sets of people, there may be a sense that the Iron Age metaphors of the prayer book — God is king, heavenly father, shepherd, or even a potter — don’t resonate with them. You say “people don’t have a God problem as much as a metaphor problem.” Can you explain that?

Rabbi Toba Spitzer: When I started this journey into metaphor and cognitive linguistics, I realized, and this is a quote from the anthropologist Barbara J. King, that “the religious imagination thrives on the human yearning to enter into emotional experience with some force vaster than ourselves.” There is some foundational human experience of the sacred that’s existed at all times and at all places. And at some point, people started using metaphors to think about and interact with that experience:  

“God is a big person” or “God’s an old man in the sky.” It’s not that that is a bad metaphor, but there are some problematic aspects to it. Or the “king” one: I think Americans have a huge problem with royalty. We’re trained to not like authority so it doesn’t work for a lot of Americans.

So the metaphor problem is, “Wow, I do have spiritual experiences. I do want to feed my spirit. And then I turned to a metaphor that doesn’t work for me, what do I do?”

I use this analogy of a restaurant — like I just walk out of the restaurant, because there’s nothing on the menu that satisfies me. And yet our ancestors had a much richer palette of metaphors to choose from that could convey their experiences of the sacred. So, the book is nothing new. It is just trying to say, what if we took these other metaphors seriously? 

So, when you try to reclaim metaphors, you’re still drawing on some of those found in tradition: God is fire, or a warrior, or an eagle, water, a rock.

I want to reclaim all of it. In the first couple of chapters I lay out this argument, which is the argument of cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, that in order to apprehend reality and get our minds around abstract things, we need metaphor. I feel like these were metaphors that were very alive in our ancestors’ lives and not just words on the page, so it’s not surprising a lot of them are from the natural world. I tried out more modern ones, like electricity and GPS, but I love the ancient ones. 

I want to dig into a few of those in a second, but I like your framing of how to deal with doubt. Instead of asking, “Do I believe this?” we can ask of a prayer: “Where is this trying to take me?” How might that work in practice?

Let’s go back to the High Holidays and some of the human metaphors. We say, “Our Father, our King.” Do I believe God is a king? No. But if I say this is poetry and my ancestors were trying to evoke something, it takes me to a few directions. I think the big theme of Rosh Hashanah is like, “I’m not the center of the universe. There’s something much bigger than me.” So what did a king represent to the ancients? Something powerful, someone who held the power of life and death in their hands, but who is also largely beneficent. The High Holiday liturgy is asking me to confront my mortality and confront the fact that I’m extremely, extremely miniscule in the scheme of the cosmos. I was just doing some research and found that referring to God as a king in the Roman period was subversive — at a time when the Roman emperor was considered God. So the metaphor is saying that while we have earthly rulers, there’s something higher than that. So even if the word “king” might not work for me, that’s powerful, and I want to go in that direction.

How might that work with water, which you write is one of the most common metaphors for God in the Hebrew Bible, as in Psalm 42: “As the deer longs for water, so does my soul long for You, O God.”

Water adds a few things. We say we are created in God’s image, and I’m 70% water. There is sacred stuff literally flowing through me. So that’s one piece. And that psalm leads me to ask, how am I dry? How do I nourish myself spiritually, what do I need? Water is also a metaphor for godly power in the Bible. If in the Bible, God’s justice is often imagined as water, how do we align ourselves with the flow? How do I get my values and my actions aligned in the new year? Right now in New England, we’re in a drought and in other parts of the world they are getting too much water. That’s scary, and God is scary. So it’s both: We need both a sense of awe and sustenance, and as we move through the High Holidays, those two pieces are a big part of the liturgy.

 

You write that in the early rabbinic period, or the first two centuries of the Common Era, the term “HaMakom” — “The Place” — had become a fairly well-known Jewish name for God. I always thought of it as just a euphemism and not really a metaphor, the way the people in Harry Potter’s world talk about “the one who shall not be named.” How is it useful to think of a place as a metaphor for God?

The rabbi’s call [God] that for two reasons. One is because wherever you are, there’s godliness. The rabbis were in a period when the Holy Place — literally, the Temple — had been destroyed and they were recreating connections to the Divine everywhere. So literally HaMakom was where we experienced the Divine in every place. It’s always associated with compassion, and a sense of God’s nearness. I’ve found that when people are in distress, whatever they think or don’t think about God, I ask them to describe for me experiences of the sacred. And they almost always talk about places. I think it’s very easy for most people to conjure up places where they feel sheltered, where they feel a sense of wonder or the sacred. Place is very accessible. 

Do you worry that if you do away with what you call the “God is a big person” metaphor, it risks making God less personal? Nature metaphors are lovely, but can they blur the intimate relationship many people hope to have with God?

I’m really not trying to get rid of any metaphors. Sometimes, you know, I want God to hold my hand or I want to feel like I’m being embraced by the Beloved or or loved by, you know, a cosmic mother or whatever it is. I don’t want to get rid of those metaphors. I think the specific metaphor of God as a distant emperor, which has sort of somehow got more dominant in Jewish tradition, is problematic because it says tyrannical power is godly. But yes, we want a deep personal connection, and the idea that God is a teacher or a lover or parent is beautiful. 

Human metaphors do not deal well, for instance, with the whole realm of theodicy, the whole realm of “when bad things happen to good people.” Because then you are stuck with, “Why is this happening to me?” or “Why is God doing this to me?” Or, “If God is good, how could God allow this to happen?” Those are just not useful questions. By contrast, when I was going through my own heartache and hard times, the water metaphor said to me, “Okay, I’m in the water, the water is godly. It’s also totally overwhelming. How do I navigate this?” That’s a really useful question. 

Can the search for new or different metaphors be pushed too far? Can you stretch the definition of God in such a way that it’s no longer God as understood by Jewish tradition? If God is water, can water create and control the universe or enter into a covenant with Abraham and Sarah or punish the Israelites for the Golden Calf, as we are told in the Bible?  

Metaphors are not definitions. In the ancient Near East, every divinity had multiple ways of being represented. And again, I think the ancients had a much more direct experience of the Divine than we can even imagine. And they knew they needed lots of metaphors, and that’s why our scriptures are filled with them.

But we need all these metaphors because different ones speak to different experiences. Fire is often a metaphor for God’s anger. We need to deal with anger. There is such a thing as holy anger and unholy anger and even holy anger can lead to destruction. That’s what many of the biblical stories show us. I think that metaphor is much more useful to me than, like, “the angry old man.” Because I understand fire. I understand how fire is completely necessary to human life and could burn you really quickly. Most people can wrap their heads around that and then think about divine fire or holy anger in a totally different way than like, “why is God mad at me?” which again, is not useful at all.

My friend Rabbi David Nelson wrote a book a few years ago called “Judaism, Physics and God,” in which he drew on metaphors from modern science to describe God, like God is a fractal, or God is a neural network connecting billions of human consciousnesses. Do you encourage people to find metaphors in current technology or society, like, I don’t know, God is a life coach or something like that? 

You know, whatever works for people. For a metaphor to be something we live by, we need to really make it active in our lives. I use GPS as a metaphor because it’s really useful. There’s three parts of GPS: There’s the location part: Where am I? That’s the spiritual question. There’s the map: How do I find my way from here to there? That’s spiritual practice. And then there’s the crowdsource: people telling me where the bumps in the road are or where the cop car is. That’s the community. I found that all of a sudden that metaphor was really useful. So I totally encourage people to dive into a metaphor, knowing that what may resonate with you today may not feel useful tomorrow.

(JTA) — When Rosh Hashanah begins on Sunday night, Temple Beth Shalom in San Juan, Puerto Rico, plans to be holding services — whether or not power has been restored after Hurricane Fiona devastated the island Sept. 18, leaving devastation in its wake.

“Thank God the temple has solar panels,” said Salatiel Corcos, the synagogue’s past-president. “They’re not in very good shape because they were damaged, but we will have services on Sunday night.”

A devastating hurricane. Power blackouts. Catastrophic flooding, yet a shortage of drinking water. Massive relief efforts underway. If Puerto Rico’s Jews feel a sense of déjà vu, there’s ample reason: The same scenario played out exactly five years ago, when Hurricane Maria — a Category 4 storm packing winds of 160 mph — forced the island’s three synagogues to cancel High Holiday services even before its arrival.

Striking Puerto Rico on Sept. 20, 2017, Maria killed about 3,000 people in its wake, left an estimated $90 billion in damages and sparked an exodus of residents to the U.S. mainland, including some of the island’s 2,500 or so Jews. It took nearly a year to restore electricity amid a fiscal crisis exacerbated by a magnitude-6.4 earthquake in January 2020 and a collapse of public finances.

By comparison, Hurricane Fiona — which struck southwestern Puerto Rico Sept. 18 as a Category 1 storm — has been less destructive. It killed eight people on the island, largely sparing the San Juan metropolitan area.

Yet extensive flooding has washed away countless roads, bridges and buildings in Arecibo, Caguas, Ponce and Mayagüez — destroying the island’s coffee, sugar and banana crops and potentially setting back the fragile Puerto Rican economy for years to come. Making matters worse, the U.S. commonwealth is in the midst of a brutal heat wave and extreme humidity that’s pushing the daytime heat index to between 105 and 109 degrees.

“This wasn’t as bad as Maria, but 75% of the island is still without electricity, and more than half are without water,” said Corcos, who runs a construction firm in the San Juan suburb of Guaynabo. “I don’t have power, water or internet, so I’m using my cellphone as a hotspot and have a generator that runs on gasoline. Since we’re an island, very few gas stations are open and lots of people are running out of diesel fuel.”

Drinking water will quickly become a serious health issue if the power grid isn’t restored soon, Corcos said..

“In the worst-case scenario, we will have to go to rivers or creeks to look for fresh water,” said Corcos, 33, who like 60% of Temple Beth Shalom’s members is a convert to Judaism rather than a Jew by birth. “Probably we’ll do that again. I know people who are getting drinking water from creeks, but it’s not very safe because it might be contaminated, so you have to boil it. Most of the houses have gas stoves, but when the gas runs out, it’s going to be a big problem.”

Jewish groups from the mainland and beyond are contributing personnel, supplies and money to a relief effort that is swelling as Fiona’s consequences become more apparent to those outside of Puerto Rico. On the ground, too, local Jews have been working to share resources with Puerto Ricans more affected by Fiona’s wrath, both because of geography and poverty.

Diego Mandelbaum, the full-time religious director of Congregation Shaare Zedek, a Conservative synagogue in San Juan’s upscale Miramar neighborhood, had just returned from distributing 30 pallets of water to flooded residents in eastern Puerto Rico.

“We were lucky because we still have enough diesel for several days. We are using donated funds to help six communities in Loiza,” said Mandelbaum, who said Shaare Zedek expects between 150 and 200 worshippers for Rosh Hashanah services this weekend.

Established in 1952, Shaare Zedek is the oldest of Puerto Rico’s three synagogues. Most of its members are native Spanish-speakers who emigrated from Cuba after Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, though Mandelbaum — a lawyer by profession — is from Argentina.

“We’re OK and our synagogue suffered no physical damage,” Mandelbaum said. “The only problem we face right now is that many of our members are without electricity. We do have a generator that’s running as we speak, but we don’t have any idea when the grid will be back online.”

Anita Wagner, who along with her husband Sammy is a longtime member of Shaare Zedek, left for Miami a few days after Fiona’s landfall, having already planned to spend the High Holidays with their children in South Florida.

“Puerto Rico’s electrical grid is very fragile, so we of course we knew there would be no power,” said Wagner, 77. “Anybody who can afford it now has a generator. We are fine, but the problem is in the mountains and the countryside, because all the rivers flooded their banks — and we were having rains for the week before the hurricane so the sand was saturated. That’s why so many bridges collapsed.”

The Wagners, who fled Cuba in 1962 and built up a successful chain of 33 department stores in Puerto Rico, plan to return to the island in time for Yom Kippur.

“A lot of people have left before, after Maria and then the earthquake. Some have come back, but I don’t think it’s enough to make up for those who left — especially the younger people,” she said. “Everybody’s praying for a quick recovery. That’s all we can do.”

Rabbi Mendel Zarchi, who has run Chabad-Lubavitch of Puerto Rico since 1999, offered a similar perspective.

“As we speak, the electricity is still off, so that’s five days and counting. And those without electricity have no water because the water pumps depend on electricity,” said Zarchi, the island’s only full-time rabbi. “Yet all this is minor for us, relative to the great impact on those who only just started recovering from the historical earthquakes that decimated southwestern Puerto Rico for over a year.”

Some 120 families now belong to Chabad — which has a 12,000-square-foot synagogue complex in suburban Isla Verde — thanks to an influx of U.S. mainland Jews attracted to Puerto Rico by recently passed tax incentives that encourage investment on the island.

In fact, Chabad now maintains a small satellite shul in the coastal resort of Dorado, west of San Juan — marking the first-ever Jewish presence outside the capital city in Puerto Rico’s history.

“In these challenging times, it’s even more meaningful when we get together and reflect on the blessings granted to us. As a community, through good and bad, we always need to lean on each other,” Zarchi said, noting the devastation that Fiona has already visited upon Puerto Rico. “We wish this was not the case. However, we don’t get to choose what comes our way.”

(JTA) — “Eretz Nehederet,” Israel’s leading satirical program, went there. Kind of.

In Israel’s political culture, in which it’s okay to call a politician just about anything, but not Hitler, the show did just that in its treatment Wednesday of Itamar Ben-Gvir, a peddler of far-right and racist ideas who is likely to be part of a governing coalition after Nov. 1 elections.

Or, not quite the Adolf Hitler who ran Germany from 1933-1945, but the singing, high-kicking Hitler imagined by Mel Brooks in his classic 1967 comedy, “The Producers.”  To the melody of that movie’s signature number, “Springtime for Hitler,” an actor playing Ben-Gvir celebrates his ascendance from pariah to being courted by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who hopes to win his old job back.

The three-minute sketch is remarkable for the number of taboos it shatters, a signal of the degree to which Israel’s secular left dreads the prospect of Ben-Gvir playing a major role in government.

“Hey friends, it’s Ben-Gvir time!” the actor sings. “He comes in a pleasant package, Kahane for the whole family!” Ben Gvir was a follower of the racist teachings of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, who was shunned by almost the entire Knesset for the single term he served in the 1980s until his Kach party was banned. Ben-Gvir now claims to no longer embrace Kahanaism.

“I’ve moderated, my friends, it’s not a mistake!” the character sings with a chorus of youths wearing yellow and black, the colors of Kach. “Or perhaps you’ve opened up a little to racism.”

The original movie performance of the song includes tap dancing to the rhythm of gunfire and vaudeville-style spoken word comic rhymes. “Don’t be stupid, be a smartie, come and join the Nazi Party!” says Brooks himself.

In the “Eretz Nehederet” version, Ben Gvir forces Netanyahu to tap dance by firing a gun at his feet, and the spoken word patter is provided by other icons of Israel’s far right, including Baruch Goldstein, the settler who massacred 29 Arabs worshipping in Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs in 1994. Ben-Gvir famously displayed a picture of Goldstein in his Hebron home.

“I committed a massacre in Hebron!” the mock-Goldstein says, holding an automatic rifle. “He deserves a Yom Zicharon!” Ben Gvir tells Netanyahu, using the Hebrew term for Day of Remembrance.

Also making an appearance is Yigal Amir, who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995; the Ben-Gvir character tells him he’ll be out of prison within a year. In real life, Ben-Gvir was a leader of the protests against Rabin that culminated in his death.

It’s not just the Hitler parallel that shatters an Israeli taboo against invoking the Nazi leader; the idea that Yom HaZicharon would be mentioned in any context but the remembrance of Israel’s fallen and the notion that Amir will ever see the light of day are also third rails in Israel.

The sketch ends by going slightly meta, with the fake Ben-Gvir ordering the arrest of Eyal Kitzis, a real actor on the show, and concludes “we’ll make Al Aqsa a parking lot!” referring to the mosque on the Temple Mount, a site holy both to Jews and Muslims and the site of escalating tensions in recent years. Ben-Gvir dances with another shrine on the site, the Dome of the Rock, as a hat.

“With Ben-Gvir, it will be shigaon!” the song concludes, using a word that means “a great time” and “insanity.” The actor playing Ben-Gvir, his eyes open wide and grinning as the camera zooms in on his face, leaves no doubt which meaning is to be inferred.

In a chilling coda, Ben Gvir and his acolytes sing a non-satirical song: “Your village will burn down,” a chant that extremists have aimed at Palestinians.

(JTA) — The kids are coming back inside for Rosh Hashanah services at Temple Shir Shalom, a Reform synagogue in suburban Detroit.

Last year, in a concession to COVID-19, the congregation held its family services on a football field. This year, the services will take place inside Shir Shalom’s West Bloomfield, Michigan building, where other changes are happening, too. Masks are recommended but no longer required, and a vaunted dessert reception is returning for the first time since 2019.

Two miles down Walnut Lake Road at Temple Israel, a slate of services has been tailored to give options to congregants depending on how much COVID risk they’re comfortable taking on. A masks-optional service on the first day of Rosh Hashanah will take place only after a first, otherwise identical service where masks are required. Later, a third service will take place outdoors, for families and people who aren’t comfortable with indoor events.

The range of options on one stretch of road in a single suburb in Michigan underscores the state of play at synagogues across the United States on the eve of the third High Holidays of the COVID-19 pandemic. As in other parts of civic life, predictable guidelines have given way to a patchwork of approaches. At the same time, pre-pandemic practices have largely returned, reflecting an acceptance of COVID-19 as here to stay that is widespread, though certainly not universal.

Until this summer, Congregation Beth Sholom in Teaneck, New Jersey, had barely held Shabbat services indoors since before March 2020, opting instead to hold services almost exclusively outside. (It also ended its Shabbat livestream in March 2022, citing Jewish law concerns.) Now, it will hold Rosh Hashanah services both in its massive auditorium and in its parking lot. Children’s services and programming will be held indoors, with air purifiers.

“Certainly the feeling is that we are another step closer to a more normative, let’s say, High Holiday experience,” Beth Sholom’s rabbi, Joel Pitkowsky, who will lead the outdoor service, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

But what is normal? More than two years into the pandemic, there is little consensus anymore about what adjustments communities should make, if any, to accommodate the still-spreading but less deadly virus. Instead, each community is making its own call, taking into account local case rates, community members’ risk tolerance, the availability of resources and Jewish law.

The result: Some synagogues are requiring attendees to show proof of vaccination while others have dropped that requirement. Some are requiring masks for indoor worshippers, while others are recommending them or just leaving the choice of whether to wear a mask up to individuals. Some are holding services partly or fully outside to reduce risk, while others say everything is back inside this year.

In all cases, plan Bs are getting made — what if a rabbi tests positive before the holiday starts, or cases tick up after Rosh Hashanah?

“The hardest thing about planning is that the ground keeps shifting,” said Melissa Balaban, the CEO of IKAR, a “post-denominational” congregation in Los Angeles. “Every event we plan now, there’s the event and then the three contingencies.”

In 2020, when one of IKAR’s rabbis tested positive, she was able to Zoom in from home to give a sermon. That won’t be possible this year, as services are taking place in person, with streaming to viewers at home. But the synagogue has options: In the case that one of the rabbis or the cantor at IKAR tests positive, the other three members of the prayer leadership should be available.

IKAR is keeping some of the changes it made because of COVID-19. Last year, the congregation offered an outdoor Neilah, the last part of the Yom Kippur service, as the sun went down.

“Being outside was really extraordinary,” Balaban said. “So I’m very excited that we’re able to do that again.”

Many synagogues do not have the luxury of a deep bench of rabbis and others who can lead the complicated, lengthy prayers for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Some rabbis have opted to reduce their personal risk in the days leading up to the holidays to lessen the possibility of having to stay home.

But others say they’re relatively unconcerned, in part because the endurance of streaming and Zoom services means they can join from home if needed. “That’s not one of the nightmare scenarios that keeps me up at night,” said Rabbi Michael Farbman of Temple Emanuel in New Haven, Connecticut, about testing positive for COVID-19 before the holiday.

Farbman is much more worried about incidents like the one that took place last year when he was streaming services from inside Temple Emanuel, a Reform synagogue, to congregants at home. During the last 15 minutes of the Yom Kippur morning service, with more than 160 people signed in, the live stream crashed from the synagogue’s end, and the service leaders in the sanctuary disappeared from the congregants’ screens.

They soon realized what had happened: A technician had accidentally cut the synagogue’s Internet connection while replacing a cable along the street. Farbman had to log into the Zoom from his phone and run between the cantors to finish up the service.

“We don’t actually have the ability to plan for everything,” Farbman said. “I’m kind of hoping that of all the things that can go whichever way this year, at least we’re not going to suddenly just disappear from the service.”

Non-Orthodox synagogues such as Farbman’s have used streaming and Zoom meetings since the beginning of the pandemic to engage congregants at home. (Two years ago, when Rosh Hashanah followed Shabbat and required streaming for longer than Zoom allowed, a Zoom employee even created a synagogue-friendly three-day streaming option.) But Orthodox synagogues have never permitted the use of electronics on Shabbat, and most moved away from major concessions to the pandemic some time ago.

The Jewish Center, a Modern Orthodox congregation on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, polled members last month on whether to offer a rooftop service, which it had offered for the past two years. Not enough people asked for the outdoor option to offer it, according to Rabbi Yosie Levine.

Instead, the synagogue is placing a mechitza, or partition used to separate men and women in Orthodox congregations, in what is usually the women’s balcony and requiring masks there, creating a space for both men and women who want to take precautions against COVID-19.

“On the one hand, we want to be as accommodating as we can be so that people who have more of a COVID-cautious streak feel comfortable participating in our services,” Levine said.  “And at the same time, we’re trying to kind of get back to normal. And sometimes, those two things are in conflict.”

As the new normal sets in, communities and their rabbis are still grappling with how to make sense of the pandemic, and the changes to Jewish communal life and worship that have been wrought as a result.

“We are not the same people we were two and a half years ago,” Pitkowsky said, adding that figuring out “how to provide a religiously inspiring setting for that new version of ourselves is a challenge.”

For now, though, there’s a set of holidays to get through and communities to reconvene.

“People have been craving opportunities to gather together,” said Rabbi Daniel Schwartz of Temple Shir Shalom, back in West Bloomfield. “Just being able to see people face-to-face again and continuing to build those relationships has been wonderful.”

(New York Jewish Week) — Boxes of kosher potatoes, onions, honey and other High Holiday staples lined the parking lot of the Chesed Center in Borough Park, Brooklyn, as a line of of cars stretched down a few blocks, all filled with mostly Orthodox families in need of food for the holidays. 

Tuesday’s food drive and giveaway was part of ongoing efforts by the Met Council, the Jewish-run anti-poverty nonprofit, to meet the needs of impoverished Jews in the New York metropolitan area. Met Council CEO David Greenfield said UJA-Federation of New York Jewish gave the organization an emergency $500,000 grant to help give out food to over 170,000 people this High Holiday season.

“We’re really facing a perfect storm of inflation and lack of federal funding and political gridlock where we have people really struggling in a way that we haven’t really seen in a very long time,” Greenfield said.

But while direct action like the Met Council’s kosher food network is the most visible of its activities, the organization is also lobbying behind the scenes for policy changes meant to address poverty and hunger. 

Directly after Rosh Hashanah, which starts Sunday evening and ends on Tuesday evening, Met Council officials will head to Washington, D.C. to take part in the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health, with the goal of showing how its work in New York can be effective on a national level

Greenfield told the New York Jewish Week that this is the first White House conference on this issue since 1969.  

“This is a big deal because the last one actually led to the creation of things like food stamps and child nutrition assistance,” Greenfield said, referring to two federal programs. “We have a lot of hope for this.” 

Met Council will focus on solutions to end world hunger, with an extra lens on ensuring that culturally appropriate food for both kosher and halal communities is included in any policy proposals.

The organization will also be showing off its digital food pantry technology that serves 50,000 people each month in New York. 

Other Jewish groups will also take part in the conference, including Mazon, the anti-hunger group.

Greenfield said that hunger is “really a public policy choice at the end of the day,” citing as an example that child poverty numbers were cut in half during the pandemic owing to government funds made available to families.  

“That was a tremendous success,” Greenfield said. “We could similarly do that with hunger.”  

Greenfield said that with the country moving on from the pandemic, inflation has given way to a new challenge in feeding people during Rosh Hashanah.  

“Speak to any working class family that goes shopping and they’ll tell you that the prices are really astronomical when it comes to the food,” Greenfield said.  

Grocery prices have risen by 13.1% over the last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  

The price of common household items have increased dramatically when compared to last year — eggs are up 38%, flour is up 22.7%, milk is up 15.6% among many other items like chicken, ground beef, fruits and vegetables.  

The poorest Jews in New York are haredi Orthodox families and Russian-speaking seniors, and Brooklyn is the center of Jewish poverty, according to a recent report by UJA-Federation. It found that 37% of Jewish adults in Brooklyn are either poor or near poor.

More than half of both Russian-speaking and Haredi households in the Jewish community are poor or near-poor, according to UJA-Federation. Some 84% of Russian-speaking seniors are poor or near poor.  

With government dollars dried up from the pandemic and other relief bills stuck in Congress, Met Council has once again called for an emergency fundraiser to help provide for families during the High Holidays. The organization aims to raise $2.2 million to distribute over $4 million worth of food from 126 locations in the New York area.  

President Joe Biden announced the hunger conference in May, saying in a video that it will bring together anti-hunger and nutrition advocates, food companies, local and state governments and others to create a plan to “combat hunger and improve nutrition for every American.”

“Too many families don’t know where they’re going to get their next meal,” Biden said. “This time we make real change. I’m committed to taking bold steps that are going to help end hunger.” 

Jessica Chait, the managing director of food programs at Met Council, told the New York Jewish Week that she is optimistic that the conference will lead to “affirmative movement” in reaching Biden’s goal to end hunger by 2030.  

“I think it’s possible,” Chait said. “It takes significant commitment, coordination and resources. We can’t do it if we don’t start somewhere, and hopefully this conference will be a kick off for doing that.” 

(New York Jewish Week) — A major donor to Yeshiva University has come out against Yeshiva University’s decision to not recognize an LGBTQ group as an official campus club. 

Its first public statement on the issue, released exclusively to the New York Jewish Week, the Wilf Family Foundations, for whom the Modern Orthodox university’s main campus in Washington Heights is named, weighed in on legal efforts by Y.U. to prevent the YU Pride Alliance from getting recognition and funding.  

“As foundations grounded in our Jewish faith and values, we steadfastly stand for tolerance, inclusion and justice, and reject discrimination of all kinds,” the foundation said in a statement. “We strongly disagree with Y.U.’s decision to not recognize the Pride Alliance and have expressed that disagreement to Y.U.’s leadership from the beginning.” 

The statement from the Wilf Family Foundations — whose benefactors are an extended New Jersey family that made its fortune in real estate, and whose members include the owners of the Minnesota Vikings — joins a growing chorus of disapproval from many with relationships to the Modern Orthodox flagship university. 

(70 Faces Media, the New York Jewish Week’s parent company, receives support from the Wilf Family Foundations.)

Among the dissenters are more than 1,000 alumni, faculty and students who have signed a widely circulated letter urging the administration to rethink its actions. The letter cites Talmud teachings to urge the university to “understand this segment of our community and its needs.” 

The Wilf Family Foundations statement comes as Yeshiva University and the YU Pride Alliance both assert their positions in court. A New York judge had ordered the university, which is officially chartered as a secular institution, to immediately recognize the club. When the U.S. Supreme Court essentially sustained that order and urged its resolution in lower courts, the university announced it would suspend all club activity rather than recognize the Pride Alliance. 

On Wednesday, the YU Pride Alliance said it would not press the issue outside of the courtroom for the time being, saying it did not want to see other clubs “punished” by the university.

In recent weeks, additional letters and statements expressing solidarity with LGBTQ students and disappointment in the university’s actions have been addressed to Yeshiva University President Ari Berman. The undergraduate faculty published a letter on Sept. 16 proclaiming their support for the university’s LGBTQ students.

Similar letters have been penned by the Y.U.’s affiliated graduate programs, including faculties at the Cardozo School of Law, the Wurzweiler School of Social Work and the Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology, as well as a letter from the Board of Overseers at Cardozo, and from the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Montefiore Medical Center and Y.U.’s affiliated Albert Einstein College of Medicine. 

“What we’re seeing is that the community at large — Yeshiva’s graduate schools, Y.U. faculty, professional psychiatrists and psychologists at Einstein and Montefiore — are all coming together and saying ‘this is unacceptable,’” Tai Miller, a plaintiff in YU Pride Alliance’s case against the university, told the New York Jewish Week. “Yeshiva’s actions are harming students. It’s treating students like second-class citizens.”

For its part, Y.U. has maintained that it cares deeply for its LGBTQ students. President Berman has released multiple statements saying, in part, “our commitment to and love for our LGBTQ students are unshakeable,” and “we welcome and care deeply for all our students, including our LGBTQ community.”

Berman has said that recognizing an LGBTQ club is “not consistent with [Y.U.’s] Torah values.” However, his statements also reflect efforts in many Modern Orthodox settings to accommodate LGBTQ community members, despite being unable to sanction homosexual behavior under their interpretation of Jewish law.  

The controversy also represents a tension between Y.U.’s official standing as a secular university that accepts public funding for its graduate and other programs, but also ordains Orthodox rabbis and whose undergraduate program is designed to be intensely religious. 

Supporters of Y.U.’s decision include alumni like Rabbi Rafi Eis, who in a recent issue of the campus newspaper The Commentator wrote that liberal values clash with Y.U.’s role as a religious institution. “Y.U. cannot maintain its religious standards and define itself as secular,” wrote Eis, who received his ordination from Y.U.’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, or RIETS. “Down the road, there will be further conflicts, like whether to accept transgender females into Stern College dormitories or transgender males into Yeshiva College.”

In another Commentator piece, Rabbi Rodney Elisha Weiss, an educator who is also an alum of Y.U. and received his ordination at RIETS, called demands to recognize an LGBTQ club an “attack on my home.”

“Y.U. has been such a special place of Torah. Why demand that we violate our precious Torah and validate this group’s agenda in our community?” he wrote. “Should we empathize with this group? Should we invite them to come to shul, the Bais Medrash [study hall], our smachot (the synagogue, the house of learning, our celebrations)? The answer is a resounding yes. But to ask Y.U. to take a position against the Torah is unfair.”

According to YU News, a publication of the university’s public affairs department, the Wilf family has been among the university’s “most generous philanthropists” for the last three decades. The family has established two major scholarship funds for undergraduates — one for need-based students and one for distinguished scholars. In 2002, Y.U. renamed its all-male undergraduate Washington Heights campus the Wilf Campus in honor of the family. The Wilfs have also established a cardiovascular research center on the university’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine campus.

“We continue to be actively engaged in discussions with the leadership of Yeshiva University to strongly encourage them to take immediate steps to grant YU Pride Alliance’s request for Club status,” their statement adds.

(JTA) — When I traveled to Poland shortly after the outbreak of the conflict in Ukraine, I met a young mother who, with her baby, fled Kyiv without her husband. More than baby food and a roof over her head, she needed a support system and community to navigate all that would come next. With the outpouring of assistance from individuals and our partner institutions abroad who see it as their duty is to aid our fellow Jews in distress and rebuild Jewish life for coming generations, my organization, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), was there for her.

Seven months later, many people outside of Ukraine think the danger has abated, that a reduction in the pace of those fleeing signals an end to their plight, and that the Ukrainian Jewish community is diminished but stable.  

Such misunderstandings downplay the urgency of challenges we have a part in solving. This is especially true given the outsized role that the global Jewish community has played to date in the humanitarian response. With tens of millions of dollars in support from the Claims Conference, Jewish federations across North America, the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, foundations, individual philanthropists and many others, we’re invested in this crisis for the long term. 

 It is important, therefore, to set out three important realities and re-engage the wider Jewish public in our critical work:  

The majority of Ukraine’s Jews, and their leaders, remain in their country.

One of them is Svetlana M., the heroic director of the JDC-supported Hesed social service center in Poltava, in central Ukraine. Hesed serves the region’s needy Jews and is a hub for crisis support. Svetlana is in her 40s, a psychologist by training, who turned her volunteerism and passion for the Jewish life into a career aiding the Jewish community. “We refuse to leave our city, and all those people who need us,” she told us. “Think about the elderly people afraid to even step foot outside. They need us, their community, now. We have a rule in our family: in good times and hard times, we should be together.” 

It’s true that tens of thousands of Jews, including some leaders, have fled. But the vast majority of the country’s estimated 200,000 Jews, like Svetlana, have remained in the country. Many escaped to Ukrainian cities in safer locations. Others have left, and then returned from abroad. Among the nearly 40,000 poor Jewish elderly and families served by JDC before the conflict, approximately 90% are still there.  

Tens of thousands of Jews in country continue to turn to the Jewish community for support during the conflict or volunteer to aid their neighbors. They are buoyed by scores of brave Jewish professionals — social service workers, JCC staff, volunteer coordinators, rabbis, and Jewish educators, and, of course, the staff of JDC — who have been leading emergency work from Kyiv to Dnipro, Odesa to Lviv.  

Svetlana and the staff and volunteers at Hesed have endured the stress of constant air raid alerts — more than 500 since Feb. 24 — and the influx of more than 250,0000 internally displaced people to the city. Svetlana has worked around the clock to address those ever-increasing human needs and to ensure the Jewish community becomes a touchpoint for joy during these tough times. Svetlana and her team — including her two sons — have planned numerous Rosh Hashanah holiday activities for seniors, teens, children, and displaced families in the coming weeks. They’ll deliver holiday aid packages and hold online and in-person celebrations with singing and traditions like apples and honey, part of our overall High Holiday efforts around the country.  

Need is spiking throughout Ukraine.

Boris R., 70, and his wife, JDC clients before the conflict, had to flee their home in the east with our help, when, as Boris tells it, “our house was ruined by shelling. There’s no apartment, nothing. At such an age, I had to leave my native town.” It was a harrowing journey, especially as Boris’s wife has advancing Alzheimer’s and cannot walk. They emerged from the building’s basement and left with nothing more than the clothes they were wearing, their passports, and their marriage certificate. 

After staying in Dnipro for 10 days to recover, Boris and his wife traveled to Lviv, where they have been for the last three months. His son and family are also nearby. Boris has no intention of leaving Ukraine, but is barely able to survive without our help. The cost of his rent, with increasing utility prices, comes to $324. He and his wife’s combined pensions are only $243. 

While headlines focus on the south and east of the country, their plight is part of an under-reported, unfolding crisis around the entire country. Decimated infrastructure, severely reduced human services, and limited access to utilities are widespread. The economic situation is dire, with skyrocketing inflation projected to hit 27% and Ukraine’s GDP expected to contract by more than 34% in 2022.  

Making matters worse, 3.6 million Ukrainians who remained lost their jobs, resulting in a population of “new poor,” previously middle class folks now facing poverty. Those who were poor before the crisis are in even worse shape. With prices for food and medicine increasing more than 20 percent in the last year, pensioners like Boris living on $3-4 a day have seen scarce resources stretched even further. Add to this the widespread reality of post-traumatic stress brought on by loss in many forms — loved ones, homes and safety. 

Our support — including food and medicines and supplemental aid for emergency needs like their rent and utilities — is a lifeline for these Ukrainians. JDC has shipped more than 600 tons of humanitarian aid into Ukraine, and we are directly supporting 35,000-plus clients today, including more than 2,600 new poor and internally displaced Jews. This is in addition to the tens of thousands of others to whom we have provided trauma support, medical care, evacuation, or hotline services to date. But — with no end to the conflict in sight — more needs to be done.  

The refugee crisis is not over. 

While the mass exodus of refugees has slowed, there are, according to our European Jewish community partners, some 10,000 Jewish refugees in their remit. The actual number is likely higher, as some have not reached out for help. As global inflation worsens and many choose to remain in Europe, we expect more may turn to Jewish communities for support. We need to ensure they are prepared with the ability to extend care to their, and our, extended Jewish family.  

In partnership with local Jewish communities, JDC is currently caring for 4,000 refugees in 13 countries. In addition to food, medicine, accommodation, psychosocial support, and connections to local programming, we’re moving from temporary care to long-term support. This includes housing solutions, health care, living stipends and workforce opportunities. And helping Ukrainian Jews to integrate into local Jewish communities is critical.  

Rosh Hashanah is approaching, ushering in a time of introspection and new beginnings. During this period, we should proudly take stock of all we have done for Ukraine’s Jews—and concentrate on all we must continue to do in the New Year ahead.

 

WASHINGTON (JTA) — The lawmakers thanked the representatives from the social networks giants for attending the Capitol Hill hearing on antisemitism — after all, it was not an official congressional hearing and no one was obliged to turn up.

But then, after some tense exchanges last Friday, things got acrimonious quickly: Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Jewish Florida Democrat who convened the hearing, said that the tech reps’ stonewalling on whether and how antisemitism would be treated will lead to congressional action.

“We’re all starting to see — anyone watching this — why we’re eventually going to have to regulate the way that this content is handled, as opposed to just leaving it to you, the companies, to comply, to make sure you’re complying with standards that really aren’t very transparent,” she said.

The panel, the Interparliamentary Anti-Semitism Task Force, is comprised of lawmakers from diverse countries, including the United States, Canada, South Africa, Israel, Sweden and New Zealand, and it has no real powers. But some of the individual lawmakers are members of governing parties and are able to take legislative action at home.

Wasserman Schultz, for instance, is a past chairwoman of the Democratic Party and is currently on two of the House of Representatives’ most powerful committees, Appropriations and Oversight. Likewise, Anthony Housefather, a Jewish member of parliament from Montreal, who is a member of Canada’s governing Liberal Party, has senior oversight roles.

Wasserman Schultz’s frustration came after Housefather was unable to elicit a commitment that the social media companies would label antisemitism as hate speech and take action to remove the phrase “Jews are all white nationalists who support Apartheid” from posts on their platforms.

Kevin Kane, the director of government affairs for YouTube said “that’s definitely something we’d want to look at,” but “it’s difficult to say in the abstract.” Representatives from TikTok, Twitter and Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, gave similarly noncommittal answers.

Housefather said the answers were “pretty disturbing.” Much of the first part of the panel had focused on the degree to which anti-Israel or Israel-critical comment is antisemitic, and the lawmakers and a group of experts enthusiastically promoted the definition of antisemitism advanced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which some liberal groups see as too broad. Housefather said he was substituting “Jews” for “Zionists” in his hypothetical as a means of addressing concerns about whether attacking “Zionism” is antisemitic.

Housefather’s hypothetical was also an allusion to the difficulties Canadian Jewish advocates had in getting Twitter to ban Laith Marouf, a Canadian pro-Palestinian advocate whose tweets included “You know all those loud mouthed bags of human feces, a.k.a. the Jewish White Supremacists; when we liberate Palestine and they have to go back to where they come from, they will return to being low voiced bitches of Christian/Secular White Supremacist Masters” and “I have a motto: Life’s too short for shoes with laces or entertaining Jewish white supremacists with anything but a bullet to the head.”

Michele Austin, Twitter’s director of public policy for the United States and Canada, was unable to explain why Marouf was allowed to return to Twitter with a different handle after having been banned from the platform in August. (Marouf was at the center of a controversy when it was revealed last month that an ostensibly antiracism organization he works for was receiving Canadian government money; the government eventually withdrew the funds.)

Another tense exchange between Austin and Michal Cotler-Wunsh, a former Israeli parliament member, had to do with the tweets of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who routinely tweets antisemitic content and calls for Israel’s destruction. Cotler-Wunsh asked why Khamenei’s tweets remain up.

“What you are referring to is the world leaders policy, and I was very happy to hear a number of the comments from the envoys and the ambassadors with regard to this issue,” Austin said, without elaborating what Twitter’s “world leaders policy” was.

Wasserman Schultz was similarly frustrated when the social media representatives would not answer with specifics about what causes delays in the removal of hateful content.

The degree of frustration among the lawmakers was most evident at the end of the panel, when Wasserman Schultz scolded the companies for offering panaceas about promoting Holocaust remembrance. Eric Ebenstein, the director of public policy at TikTok, had listed a number of Holocaust commemorations the platform had promoted.

“Each of you in some way mentioned your pride in acknowledging Yom Hashoah and other specific Jewish holidays,” Wasserman Schultz said, referencing Israel’s Holocaust remembrance day. “Antisemitism is a viral toxic infection that drives real-world violence. And for you to only scratch the surface or to pander and use examples of, you know, like ‘some of your best friends are Jews’ is insulting and frustrating. So I would just suggest in the future when you’re testifying on this topic that perhaps you might not want to use those kinds of examples.”

(JTA) – A Navy contractor and ex-Army reservist who took part in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot on the U.S. Capitol and has a history of making antisemitic and white supremacist statements was sentenced Thursday to four years in prison.

Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, who sported a “Hitler mustache” and was known to joke about killing and eating Jews, was captured on video breaching the Capitol and leading others inside in a right-wing mob’s efforts to prevent the Senate to certify Joe Biden’s election as president. He was convicted in May of all five charges against him. 

At Hale-Cusanelli’s sentencing, the judge said his “sexist, racist and antisemitic comments” were motivators for his actions on that fateful day. He did not appear to belong to any organized hate groups.

The fifth Jan. 6 defendant to face a jury trial, Hale-Cusanelli gained outsized public attention owing to his Hitler-styled appearance and an uncovered history of antisemitic and white supremacist activity (though he unsuccessfully argued at his trial that his comments were “ironic humor,” not what he really believed, and also claimed to be half-Jewish and half-Puerto Rican). 

He was held in custody until his trial in part because prosecutors argued the New Jersey native would be a danger to the local Jewish community if he were released.

Prosecutors continued to hammer home his ideological leanings at his sentencing, where he also received three years of supervised release and was ordered to pay $2,000 in restitution.

“It is well established in the record at this point that Hale-Cusanelli subscribes to White Supremacist and Nazi-Sympathizer ideologies that drive his enthusiasm for another civil war and formed the basis of this Court’s pretrial determination that Hale-Cusanelli was a danger to the community,” prosecutor Kathryn Fifield wrote in her sentencing memorandum.