Jewish groups welcomed the decision to maintain the ban on Palestine Action, which has staged multiple destructive attacks on military installations and weapons manufacturers in Britain.

The government banned Palestine Action in July 2025 after some of its members broke into an air force base and damaged two military aircraft as part of a protest against the U.K.’s relationship to Israel during the war in Gaza. The ruling meant that anyone displaying support for the group has been subject to arrest and imprisonment.

The British High Court declared the ban unlawful in February, concluding that the ban interfered with Palestine Action members’ rights to speech and assembly. Now, a five-judge U.K. Court of Appeal panel has ruled that the group’s activities met the legal standards for terrorism and the government’s decision to ban the group was justified and proportionate.

Sue Carr, England’s chief justice, said in a statement broadcast from the court that while many Palestine Action activities and affiliates were non-violent, the group’s materials and impact showed that violence was integral to its activities.

“It is not, as it claims, a direct action civil disobedience protest group like the suffragettes operating transparently in the open,” Carr said. “It is a covert organization operating with secret cells to avoid the detection and prosecution of those using violence to destroy the property of third parties.”

British Jewish groups applauded the decision. “The Court’s decision confirms the seriousness of Palestine Action’s activities,” Board of Deputies of British Jews Acting President Adrian Cohen said in an email to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Cohen noted that Palestine Action’s targets have included Jewish communal institutions and Jewish-owned businesses. He added, “At a time of record levels of antisemitism, division, and communal tensions, all those in public life should be clear: no cause justifies criminality, violence or the glorification of those who carry it out.”

The ruling comes days after four Palestine Action-affiliated activists were sentenced to lengthy prison terms in connection with an August 2024 break-in at the headquarters of Elbit Systems UK, the British outpost of an Israeli weapons company. The activists had previously been acquitted on some charges but were prosecuted again on others and convicted, including one on charges of striking a police officer with a sledgehammer..

More than 100 people were arrested on Friday after Palestine Action’s supporters rallied outside the sentencing. They joined more than 3,000 people who British media report have been arrested for showing support for Palestine Action since its ban. Other supporters include the writer Sally Rooney, who last year pledged proceeds from the BBC productions of her books to the group despite potential legal penalties.

The group is vowing to appeal its ban yet again. “We will not stop fighting for the ban to be lifted, the end of the use of terror legislation against us, and crucially, for a free Palestine,” co-founder Huda Ammori posted on X on Monday. “I will appeal to the Supreme Court and take it up to the European Court of Human Rights, if needs be.”

The ruling comes as Prime Minister Keir Starmer seeks new powers to ban state-backed groups, such as the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, as terrorist organizations. (British law currently reserves such bans for non-state actors.) The Campaign Against Antisemitism, a British advocacy group, said the ruling about Palestine Action “underscores the Home Secretary’s power to proscribe terrorist networks” and called for the IRGC and other groups to be banned.

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Jackson Lahmeyer, the founder of Pastors for Trump and a political activist from the Tulsa area, secured the president’s endorsement ahead of Tuesday’s primary for the state’s solidly Republican 1st District House seat. Other big GOP endorsements soon followed, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, helping to pull Lahmeyer away from the other nine candidates vying for the nomination.

Much of Lahmeyer’s national profile has been defined by his regular invocations of “sharia law,” traditional Muslim doctrine often used as a right-wing shock tactic. One of his campaign platforms is “Ensuring That Sharia Law Never Takes Root In Our Nation.”

On Sunday, Lahmeyer also responded to allegations published by the Daily Mail that he had cheated on his wife, writing in a post on X that “this matter was already dealt with privately between me and my wife, Kendra, through counsel and prayer with God and spiritual advisors.”

Oklahoma’s 1st Congressional District is home to a thriving Jewish community — one that has recently urged Jews from Canada to take up residence — as well as multiple large Jewish organizations including Schusterman Family Philanthropies.

Multiple representatives of the Jewish Federation of Tulsa declined to comment on Lahmeyer’s candidacy. But it’s clear that if elected, he will bring to Congress some specific ideas about Jews.

“The Antichrist will be a political leader of Jewish descent,” he told a livestream of his church on Oct. 8, 2024, a day after the one-year anniversary of Hamas’ attack on Israel. “That is how the Jews will worship him.”

During his sermon, Lahmeyer based the claim on his reading of biblical prophecy, arguing that the Antichrist will “speak great blasphemy” and will “have no regard for the gods of his fathers.”

Lahmeyer’s preaching about the Jewish Antichrist has also sparked concern among some Jewish voters.

“Jackson, I am appalled at this post. I’m Jewish. I supported you[r] run for office at every turn. I have children and grandchildren. Antisemitism is at an all time high. I’m scared for them. This is abhorrent,” one X user wrote in response to a February 2023 post on X by Lahmeyer claiming the Antichrist will be “Jewish” and a “homosexual.”

Lahmeyer pushed back on the response, replying to the user that “This is not anti-Semitic AT ALL. The Christ is Jewish. Scripture indicates that the Antichrist will also be Jewish.”

Despite those apocalyptic beliefs, Lahmeyer has repeatedly framed support for Israel as a key tenet of his faith, reflecting a Christian Zionist worldview that sees Jewish return to Israel as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

“I stand with the Jewish people because God almighty stands with the Jewish people,” Lahmeyer said in an Oct. 9, 2025 post dismissing claims he had been paid by the Israeli government to post pro-Israel content. “So those of you who are out there saying I’m getting $7,000 a post, I wish that were true, but you’re an idiot and you’re wrong.”

Matthew Taylor, a scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, & Jewish Studies, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that Lahmeyer’s statements about Jews and Israel reflect a typical strain of Christian Zionism.

“He’s pro-Israel in this very particular sense of he has a strong attachment to a theological conception of Israel,” Taylor said. “When it comes to questions about the Antichrist and whether the Antichrist is Jewish or not, that’s all pretty standard speculation within modern evangelicalism.”

Those views, once largely confined to Lahmeyer’s reach as a storefront pastor, have followed him into a larger political arena as he has transformed from a fringe activist into a political contender with presidential backing.

“It is my Great Honor to endorse MAGA Warrior, Jackson Lahmeyer, who is running to represent the fantastic people of Oklahoma’s 1st Congressional District, and has been with me from the very beginning of our Movement to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social Monday reaffirming his endorsement of Lahmeyer.

Trump praised Lahmeyer’s role in founding “Pastors for Trump,” which he launched in 2022 to organize evangelical pastors around getting Trump reelected. The same year, Lahmeyer lost his Republican primary bid to unseat Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford, whom he called a “coward” for not backing Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Lahmeyer, who did not return a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for an interview, is a member of the White House Faith Office and Trump’s National Faith Advisory Board.

He has been cultivating relationships with the Trumps for years. In addition to backing the president’s election claims, Lahmeyer has hosted the president’s sons, Eric and Donald Jr., as well as FBI Director Kash Patel at his church and on podcast episodes.

Lahmeyer’s rise coincides with a growing movement of conservative Christians and right-wing influencers who have been increasingly critical of Israel and the U.S.-Israel alliance.

During an event marking the second anniversary of Oct. 7 titled “The Case for Israel,” Lahmeyer addressed the growing prominence of anti-Israel figures on the Christian right, including Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens.

“Both Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, they’re Roman Catholics, so to them the church has replaced the Jewish people, the state of Israel, and that is why they can make these claims,” Lahmeyer said.

But Lahmeyer has stopped short of condemning Carlson’s rhetoric, despite criticism from Trump and evangelical members of his administration including U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee.

“Some very influential leaders, all of whom I like — Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Marjorie Taylor Greene — have taken a very controversial stance in regards to the nation of Israel,” Lahmeyer told NPR in November.

Taylor said the fallout over Israel within the MAGA coalition between Christian antisemites, such as Carlson and Owens, and Christian philosemites, such as Huckabee, placed Lahmeyer in a precarious position as he seeks office.

White evangelicals show widespread support for Israel, with 72% reporting a positive opinion of the Jewish state according to an April 2025 poll by the Pew Research Center, but among Republicans under 50, positive sentiments about Israel have dropped in recent years, falling from 63% reporting a positive view in 2022 to 48% in 2025.

“A lot of young evangelicals are moving away from Zionism, and becoming less sympathetic with the state of Israel, both theologically and just in terms of world events, and the war in Gaza,” Taylor said. “So I think it’s a very complicated place that he’s in, trying to kind of run as a politician in this moment where MAGA is fracturing over some of the things he could be very publicly identified with.”

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This time around, as President Donald Trump has announced a new deal with Iran after months of war that the United States fought jointly with Israel, American Jewish groups are more unified: They aren’t happy.

On the right and the left, Jewish groups are expressing concerns about the deal that Trump and Iran announced on Sunday night, even as its terms have not yet officially come into focus.

Trump has emphasized that the deal reopens the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran closed after the war began on Feb. 28.  U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance also told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that the deal would include significant sanctions relief in exchange for Iran’s agreement that it would give up its nuclear weapons program.

But it’s not clear what concessions Iran has made on the nuclear front, while there are no indications other issues key to Israeli security, including Tehran’s ballistic missile program and proxy network, have been addressed. Though Israel and the U.S. undertook the war jointly in February, Israel was not a party to the negotiations and has come under repeated criticism from Trump for jeopardizing talks with Iran.

“At worst, it’s an admission of defeat by the United States,” said Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, in a statement on Monday about the deal. The group was founded in 2017 as a successor to the National Jewish Democratic Council, which supported the Obama-era deal, called the JCPOA.

Soifer added, “Donald Trump was so desperate to get a deal with Iran that he was unabashedly willing to push Israel aside, demonstrating — yet again — that Trump has no loyalty or commitment to anyone other than himself.”

The right-wing Zionist Organization of America, meanwhile, expressed gratitude to Trump for taking on Iran but reacted to the deal as it had to the JCPOA, with great concern.

“We call on the administration to disclose the terms as soon as possible,” President Morton Klein said in a statement. “However, the little that we know is deeply problematic.”

Klein’s statement outlined a host of qualms based on reporting about the deal’s possible conditions, including about signs that Trump had agreed to a deal that omitted terms that Trump previously said repeatedly were essential for a U.S. agreement.

“It makes no sense for the U.S. to immediately give up its pressure on the Iranian regime — the blockade that was strangulating Iran economically — without obtaining immediate removal of Iran’s nuclear stockpile, decommissioning of Iran’s nuclear facilities, and destruction of Iran’s deadly missile stockpile,” Klein said.

The progressive group J Street opposed the war from the start and said it welcomed its conclusion. “

At the same time,” it said in a statement, “it is important to acknowledge a basic reality: This costly and illegal war achieved none of the sweeping objectives that were repeatedly invoked to justify it. … The tragedy is that diplomacy had already produced a workable framework. The JCPOA was effectively constraining Iran’s nuclear program until President Trump chose to abandon it.”

AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby that was one of the strongest opponents of the JCPOA, has not issued a statement about the new deal. But it retweeted a comment from Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott listing a set of objectives that it’s not clear the agreement achieves.

“Any deal we make with Iran needs to permanently end their nuclear program, end their missile program, and stop their decades-long terror funding,” Scott said.

Scott’s fellow Republican senator, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, was among those on both sides of the aisle expressing qualms. “I am somewhat concerned that Iran’s view of the agreement seems different than what the American negotiating team is claiming,” Graham tweeted on Sunday, saying that he thought it was “imperative” that Vance present the terms of the deal to Congress for approval.

Vance said on Monday that the deal had been “digitally” signed already despite “technical things” that still needed to be worked out ahead of a ceremony planned for Switzerland on Friday. Speaking to U.S. media, he said he believed the terms were being mischaracterized and that the deal would result in an Iran without nuclear ambitions.

“If the Iranians are willing to give a long-term commitment, along with proper verification, to giving up that nuclear weapon, we’re willing to welcome them into the world economy to lift some sanctions and to turn over a new leaf in that relationship,” Vance said on “Good Morning America.”

Some Jewish groups have been more circumspect in their initial responses.

The Republican Jewish Coalition has not issued a statement on the deal, though it has retweeted Trump’s social media posts promoting it. The coalition did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.

The Democratic Majority for Israel, meanwhile, urged Trump in a statement from its president, Brian Romick, to “bring in serious and experienced negotiators and technical experts to get this deal over the finish line, rather than relying on friends, family, and donors.” Romick also criticized Trump for cutting Israel out of negotiations — but he left some room for optimism.

“We continue to stand with the Israeli people who have been at war for more than two years, the people of Iran who have endured too many decades under a brutal regime and bravely demanded an end to oppression, as well as the Lebanese people who have lived under Hezbollah’s Iran-backed occupation for decades,” Romick said. “We will await the final text of this deal and hopefully bring this war to an end.”

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Congregation Beth Adam, a Humanistic congregation in Cincinnati, sought membership in the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, now the Union for Reform Judaism. Beth Adam had removed God-language from its liturgy entirely. Its leaders argued that many modern Jews could no longer pray honestly with words that assumed a personal, commanding God. They wanted Jewish ritual, Jewish ethics, Jewish memory, and Jewish community without supernatural theism.

They also wanted to belong to the Reform movement, send children to Reform summer camps and hire rabbis from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

Reform Judaism had always made room for Jews who doubted God, argued with God, redefined God, or stopped believing in God altogether, especially after the Holocaust. Beth Adam said, in effect: We are simply the logical extension of what you already allow.

The question was never whether individual Reform Jews could doubt God, which they can and do. It was whether the Reform movement could welcome a congregation organized around God’s absence and still say what it stood for.

The answer was no. As Rabbi Gunther Plaut wrote in his responsum: “Yesh gevul. There is a boundary. If we are everything, we are nothing.”

Beth Adam’s application forced the movement to ask what it could absorb without losing something essential as a movement.

That question of the Reform movement’s boundaries has returned, not about God but about Zionism. It erupted at the Zionist Rabbinic Coalition‘s conference last month.

Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, a founder of the coalition, warned that the Reform movement cannot ordain rabbis who reject Zionism without losing something essential.

Andrew Rehfeld, the president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, where I was ordained, said the seminary is committed to Zionism but also must protect serious inquiry, even when students arrive at conclusions many Jews find painful, frightening or wrong.

God and Zionism are not the same kind of commitment. One is theological. The other is historical, political and civilizational. Still, the structural questions are remarkably similar.

When does openness become incoherence? When does a movement lose the ability to say what it is trying to build and sustain?

For much of the last half century, Reform Judaism did necessary and morally serious work to expand our boundaries. Women entered the rabbinate and cantorate. LGBTQ Jews found welcome and affirmation. Patrilineal descent reshaped who was counted. Interfaith families moved from the margins toward the center. New Jews joined our communities in serious numbers. These, among many other changes, allowed people who had long stood at the edges of Jewish community to find a genuine home.

Every expansion created new questions about what values and commitments are at the center.

What happened, and I say this implicating myself as much as anyone, is that we became extraordinarily good at helping people cross the threshold, and considerably less confident naming the commitments we hoped they would discover and actively make once they were inside.

Conversion classes multiplied. Sustained encounters with Jewish texts did not always keep pace. Programs proliferated. Pathways to deep Jewish literacy did not. We learned a fluent language of welcome while quietly de-emphasizing the equally important language of obligation. We told people they belonged. We were less clear about what belonging asks.

We gave people a doorway. But we were less clear about what crossing the threshold also obligates us to do. And we failed to confront with honesty the fact that universal values alone rarely lead Jews back to particular Jewish obligation.

The path usually runs the other way: Jewish peoplehood, covenant, mitzvot, memory and commanded responsibility can open us toward the dignity of all people. But if we begin and end with universal values and minimal Jewish literacy, we should not be surprised when Jews lose the particular vocabulary of care, obligation and responsibility for one another.

If the last few years have taught us anything, it is that no one will care for Jews more than Jews. Jews must be taught to care for one another.

Yet in North America, the boundary question being asked is whether we still understand ourselves as responsible for Jews we do not know, living lives that look different from ours, carrying experiences we may not fully understand.

Peoplehood is the claim that Jews in Charlotte and Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and New York, Dallas and Paris, Buenos Aires and Madrid, are responsible for one another’s future. It does not require agreement. It does not cancel criticism. It does not excuse injustice. But it is real, and it is not, in my opinion, optional.

These days, the term anti-Zionism is being used loosely.  Some Zionists are using the term anti-Zionism to deliberately delegitimize fierce criticism of Israel, opposition to occupation, anger at the current government, or rejection of a triumphalist nationalism, including the awful versions we see among West Bank settlers who attack Palestinians and ministers who advocate ethnic cleansing. These critical stances are not at all anti-Zionist positions. Indeed, these are Zionist positions because they come from the stance that Israel matters to Jews.

But anti-Zionism can also mean the belief that the Jewish people alone, among the peoples of the world, have no legitimate right to collective self-determination. It can mean that Israel should no longer exist in any recognizable form as the homeland of the Jewish people. And while such a person should be welcome in Reform synagogues, I do not understand what it would mean for a Reform seminary to authorize such a person as a rabbi or cantor.

Rabbinic leadership is about transmission and relationship. A rabbi helps Jews locate themselves within a people, a history, a covenant and a future. That work rests on a basic recognition that the people are worth transmitting. That the story is worth carrying forward. That Jews remain responsible for one another even when we are angry, ashamed, afraid, or divided.

If someone genuinely believes that Jewish collective self-determination is morally illegitimate and unacceptable, or that Israel should no longer exist in any recognizable form as the homeland of the Jewish people, that conviction shapes what they will teach, what they will withhold and what they will regard as worthy of passing on. We can’t be confident that they will cultivate Jews who are literate, who know themselves to be responsible for the Jewish people, and whose particular obligations open them toward responsibility for the world.

We need Jews formed by peoplehood, covenant, mitzvot, memory and obligation. Jews who can see Palestinian suffering without abandoning Jewish peoplehood. Jews who can love Israel while understanding the responsibilities of power. Jews who criticize their own people from a place of love rather than abandonment. Jews who can live with tension without mistaking tension for failure.

Yesh gevul does not mean we are finished asking questions. It means we know what we are trying to kindle. And we cannot authorize as kindlers those who believe that the flame has no right to exist.

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Israeli politicians are railing against the deal and insisting that the country will maintain its freedom of operation against Lebanon-based Hezbollah, which is funded by Iran and attacked Israel days after the U.S. and Israel launched the recent war in Iran at the end of February.

“The deal’s all signed,” Trump said in reference to the Memorandum of Understanding between the U.S. and Iran announced on Sunday night. He made the comments in Evian, France, beside French President Emmanuel Macron in advance of a meeting with the G7. The Straits of Hormuz are partially opened and will be fully open by Friday, Trump added.

The “main thing is that Iran is not expected to have a nuclear weapon and they have fully agreed to that with strong policing powers,” Trump said.

Earlier in the day, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that the deal included significant sanctions relief in exchange for Iran’s agreement that it would give up its nuclear weapons program, asserting that Tehran would not have enough money to build atomic bombs. 

He also noted that the memorandum had been “digitally” signed Sunday in advance of a formal signing ceremony in Geneva on Friday. In France, Trump said that Vance would represent the United States at that ceremony.

The details of the memorandum have not yet been made public, but it’s already clear from public statements including those made by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on X that Sunday’s deal is also expected to end the war between Israel and the Iranian proxy Hezbollah.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei told reporters that Lebanon was an essential part of the deal, according to the state-affiliated Tasnim news agency.

Though Trump has strongly pressured Israel to comply with the agreement to end hostilities, Israel has objected to the inclusion of Lebanon in the deal between the United States and Iran. 

Trump told reporters in France that “we do need to straighten out the Lebanon thing,” adding that he intended to speak with Hezbollah as part of that effort.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz, speaking before Trump’s remarks, insisted that his country would continue to defend its northern border from Hezbollah attacks and would retain a presence in Lebanon. 

“If Iran attacks Israel due to events in Lebanon — we will strike it with full force and make the power gap between us abundantly clear,” Katz said.

Israel was not a party to Sunday’s agreement, which it fears will strengthen Iran and Hezbollah and provide funds for Tehran to rebuild its nuclear and ballistic missile program. Several European leaders, however, welcomed the move. “This is a hugely significant moment. We have long called for de-escalation,” British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said, stressing that “it is vital that all parties seize this opportunity … To secure stability in the region.” 

Macron told Trump that the deal was an “important step” toward peace.

Katz, for his part, noted that Israel has conveyed its position to the U.S. administration that it will keep troops in Lebanon, where low-level fighting continued on Monday.

“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clarified this to U.S. President Trump and other senior American officials, and I also made this clear yesterday to U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth,” Katz said.

Israel’s policy is to keep the IDF indefinitely in the security zones it’s established in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza in order to protect communities along the Israeli border, Katz added.

Sunday’s memorandum is expected to extend the shaky ceasefire of April 8 between Iran and the U.S. for 60 days, during which time the countries will negotiate a broader agreement addressing Iran’s nuclear program.

Trump told The New York Times on Sunday that he would renew military strikes on Iran if a nuclear agreement is not finalized.

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Seven of those arrested came from pro-Israel groups, while six were affiliated with pro-Palestinian groups, the Metropolitan Police told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Monday.

“The Great Israeli Real Estate Event” had drawn controversy for weeks, with multiple organizations including Amnesty International claiming the event organizers were selling “stolen” Palestinian lands in West Bank settlements and politicians including the mayor of London expressing opposition to the event.

The event organizers, meanwhile, told the Jewish News that all the properties being presented were located within Israel’s internationally recognized borders.

The event took place a day before a U.K. appeals court ruled that last year’s ban of a prominent anti-Israel group, Palestine Action, was legal.

The confrontation on Sunday followed similar ones in New York City and beyond over Israeli real estate events in recent months. A demonstration outside a Manhattan synagogue that was hosting such an event in November during which pro-Palestinian activists threatened violence spurred a new law constraining protests there.

London’s Metropolitan Police estimated that 1,000 people showed up to demonstrate outside Edgware United Synagogue, in northwest London. The department said it had coordinated with the Jewish Community Security Trust and deployed officers to deal with any disruptions. It also set up barriers to separate pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel groups.

During the confrontation, 14 arrests were made, including five for violent disorder, six for racial/religiously aggravated offenses, one for assault on an emergency worker, one for Public Order Act-related offenses, and one for common assault.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews’ acting president, Adam Cohen, said the group was  “deeply disturbed at the wholly unjustified protest” outside a synagogue in a statement that reiterated that the event organizers had “publicly refuted claims that the event is marketing real estate over the Green Line” separating Israel from the West Bank.

The “false pretenses seems to be little more than an excuse to harass and intimidate members of the Jewish community,” Cohen said.

The protest was organized by an array of pro-Palestinian groups, including the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians, which issued a public letter criticizing the synagogue, and Jewish anti-Zionist groups. At least one Jewish anti-Zionist was arrested while protesting, according to a post by the groups on Instagram.

Under pressure ahead of the event, the original venue set to host it pulled out on Friday, the Jewish News reported. Registered attendees were sent messages via email and WhatsApp on Friday informing them of the change and learned about the new venue via an email at 11 p.m. Saturday that told them there would be ID checks and metal detectors at the doors.

The change in venue came following criticism from not just anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian organizations, but national politicians. Close to 100 members of parliament wrote a letter to Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper calling on her to investigate what they said was event at which “land in cities and towns built on the forced displacement of Palestinian people including properties in Israeli settlements across the occupied West Bank will be available for purchase.”

They also argued allowing the sale of these properties would contribute to settlement expansion, which the U.K. government regards as a violation of international law.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan also expressed “concerns” about the event on Friday after Green Party leader Zack Polanski, a prominent critic of Israel, asked him about it during a public availability.

“I condemn any attempt to sell property in the settlements, be that in London or anywhere else in the world,” Khan said. “I share concerns about the Great Israeli Real Estate taking place in our city, which I oppose.”

The Board of Deputies said it was “very disappointing” that public figures had not acknowledged the event organizers’ claims about no West Bank properties being presented “and instead inflamed tensions through partial and misleading commentary.”

This latest confrontation with anti-Israel demonstrators comes at a time of heightened tension in the U.K. Jewish community, and particularly in Jewish neighborhoods in London, where many residents feel unsafe after a string of incidents including the arson of four Hatzola ambulances in March; attempted attacks on three synagogues; and the stabbing of two Jewish men in the Orthodox neighborhood of Golders Green in late April. Dozens of people have been arrested in connection with the incidents.

As part of a crackdown meant to protect Jewish communities, the British government has adopted policies that give law enforcement new latitude to constrain protests.

“New measures under the Crime and Policing Act, called for by the Board and community partners, will from the end of the month give police new powers to impose conditions on protests near places of worship,” Cohen said. “We are calling on the police to ensure such protests are kept a significant distance from places of worship to prevent intimidation to members of the Jewish community.”

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The number is meaningful in Jewish tradition because it signifies the number of commandments, or mitzvot, outlined in the Torah.

For years, the number has hung from the rafters at Madison Square Garden — a reference to the number of lifetime wins notched by Red Holzman, the Jewish coach who led the Knicks during their previous championship runs, in 1970 and 1973.

On Saturday, it also became the date that the Knicks’ championship dry spell was broken: June 13, or 6/13.

For some Jews watching, the confluence of 613’s was evidence of divine intervention in the Knicks’ title win.

“Today is 6/13. There are 613 commandments in the Torah. Tonight, the Knicks are the champions. ,” tweeted Simone Weichselbaum, a native New Yorker. “I rest my case. ”

Yossi Farro, who has made a name online by posting pictures of himself aiding Jewish celebrities, including athletes, in applying prayer phylacteries, tweeted an image showcasing the 613s in Knicks lore. “Faith. History. Legacy,” he wrote. “Amazing how sometimes everything comes full circle.”

Some online Jewish commentators found even more to read into the date. Moshe Spern, a New York City educator and activist, noted that not only is 613 significant in Jewish tradition, but 26, the rest of the date, also resonated. “And 26 is the gematria of Hashems name,” he tweeted, using a Hebrew name for God and referring to the kabbalistic practice of assigning numerical value to letters and their combinations. He concluded, “Today is a miracle!!”

Jewish Knicks diehards were talking about the 613 tie-in well before the date breaking the championship dry streak was revealed.

The Manhattan psychologist to the stars Ike Hershkopf, who would later be accused of abusing his power in a 2019 podcast, told the New York Jewish Week in 1998 that he had informed Holzman about how meaningful his lifetime achievement was.

“I wrote a letter telling him that 613 is the single most special number in the Jewish religion, signifying the number of commandments that an observant Jew observes,” Herschkopf said. “I told him the highest praise that one could give to a Jew is to say he is a 613 man. … Subsequently he told me that he was so taken with this that he not only framed the letter but sent out copies to his friends.”

Red Holzman, coach of the New York Knicks, shown on the sidelines during game action against Philadelphia 76ers, March 5, 1977. (Getty Images)

Last week, Rabbi Justin Pines, the chief executive officer of the Jewish Broadcasting Service, noted the Holzman banner in a broadcast. “Coincidence?” he asked. “Or a divine reminder hanging right over the court?” (The championship win unfolded in Texas at the home arena of the San Antonio spurs.)

Even those who satirize Jews online got in on the action on Saturday night.

“The Knicks won on 6/13. 613 is the number of Jewish commandments,” tweeted a parody account ostensibly attributed to a fake rabbi that often goads antisemites online. “And you’re telling me the Mossad didn’t have to do with Jew York winning the finals??”

For OG Anunoby, the Knicks’ forward who scored the game-winning putback in game four, the date of the victory had its own significance: It was the seventh anniversary of his first NBA title, with the Toronto Raptors.

“It’s a great day — what’s it, June 13th?” he said during a postgame press conference. “Yeah, June 13th is an amazing day.”

Not everyone appreciated the numerical reading between the lines, saying that at a time when many Jews feel under siege in New York City, and when politics have driven wedges between neighbors, the championship provided a moment of relief very much of this world.

“Guys stop giving divrei Torah about the date being 613 and the Knicks winning. There’s no connection between the number of mitzvot, today’s English date and a basketball team. Y’all are far-fetched,” tweeted a New York woman who goes by the Jewish Meme Queen online.

“You know what’s actually inspiring?” she continued. “The Knicks working their butts off to win. The sacrifices their families made for this moment. NYC coming together despite our differences.”

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“We saved the State of Israel from the threat of nuclear annihilation,” Netanyahu told reporters after waiting more than 24 hours to comment on the deal, which was widely panned in Israel as a “dangerous step” that emboldened Iran.

“Iran was speeding toward becoming a nuclear power right before ‘Operation Roaring Lion,’” Netanyahu said, using Israel’s name for the war that began on February 28 with a joint US-Israeli strike against the Islamic Republic. A few days later, Iran-backed Hezbollah began firing on Israel from Lebanon.

“If we had not acted, Iran would already have atomic bombs,” Netanyahu said, adding that millions of Israeli citizens would have “been in terrible danger of mass death.”

His political foes, however, have accused him of “historic failure” after the U.S.-Iran agreement was announced Sunday. Israel has waged war against the Iranian proxy groups Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen as well as directly with the Islamic Republic in Iran without actually vanquishing any of these enemies.

Netanyahu, who is set to seek re-election in the fall, had initially hoped to secure a military victory that would prevent a nuclear Iran and bring about the fall of the Islamic Regime.

Knesset Member Yair Golan, who heads the left-wing Democrats Party, wrote on X that with one stroke of the pen Trump had erased tremendous military achievements secured with the blood of Israeli fighters, leaving Netanyahu “weak, sick, isolated and ineffective.”  

Golan warned that the U.S. agreement “provides a lifeline to the murderous regime in Tehran” by pouring billions of dollars into the Iranian regime via sanctions relief, leaving too much of the nuclear infrastructure in place and failing to eliminate the ballistic missile threat.

“Netanyahu, the man who for years sold the Israeli public the false image of ‘Mr. Security,’ has in fact become the father of the greatest strategic failure in Israeli history,” Golan added.

At a press conference on Monday night in Israel, right-wing former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett of the Yachad Party called the deal a “historic failure.” 

His second in the party, MK Yair Lapid, who is a former prime minister and foreign minister, said, “Netanyahu lost the war. Netanyahu failed to deliver the goods – he collapsed when the moment of truth hit.” 

Meanwhile, far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is one of Netanyahu’s governing partners but is not part of the prime minister’s Likud Party and often strays from the coalition’s official line, warned that the memorandum was “bad for Israel and the entire free world.” 

He added on X, “We will have to continue the campaign to overthrow the regime ourselves and in creative ways and ensure that Iran never has a nuclear weapon.”

The deal also underscored the deep divisions between Trump and Netanyahu, who has been among the American President’s staunchest allies but who now appears in danger of losing that favored status.

At Monday night’s press conference, Netanyahu tried to dismiss concern about his ties with Trump, describing the relationship as one of close partners who sometimes disagree. Israel cannot ignore its geopolitical reality, but it also can’t dismiss security concerns, Netanyahu said, adding that he doesn’t plan to restrain himself when it comes to preventing a nuclear Iran.

“Iran can’t have nuclear weapons,” he stressed.

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That’s because he coached a Jewish community center’s youth basketball team in South Jersey, leading them to two gold medals and two silvers at the JCC Maccabi Games, which hosts JCC teams from around the United States every year.

“We were holding basketball tryouts,” recalled Rob Kiewe, who served as the Katz JCC’s fitness and wellness director for more than two decades, “and our Maccabi [Games] chairperson at the time was in the gym.”

By this point, in the mid-2000s, Rose had built himself up to become a high-profile agent with superstar clients like LeBron James and Allen Iverson. And yet here he was, volunteering at the local JCC in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, the same township where he’d grown up.

During a break in the tryout, the Maccabi chairperson took the kids aside. “‘Guys, I just want you to understand who this guy is, what his life is like,’” Kiewe recalled him saying. “‘And he takes time out on a Sunday morning to run a tryout and run this team.’”

It would be another decade-plus before Rose moved into his role with the Knicks in 2020, but he was already a big name in professional basketball at the time. Still, “you’d never know he was who he was; he walks the halls like a regular Joe, always has,” said Kiewe, who is now chief operations officer of the Jewish Federation of South Jersey.

He added, “He’s a mensch. He is the true embodiment of a mensch.”

Rose is not the face of the Knicks franchise. He does not have the fame of the team’s’ players, nor the notoriety of team owner and billionaire James Dolan. But as the leader of the front office, Rose is credited with making a series of transactions — including signing Jalen Brunson, and trading for Karl-Anthony Towns, OG Anunoby and Mikal Bridges — that have guided the Knicks to the precipice of their first championship since 1973.

The Knicks’ Finals run has united the city at a time when division has roiled some in the Jewish community. It’s sparked rallying cries like the now-iconic “My mayor Muslim, my bagels Jewish” rhyme, and memes with Jalen Brunson’s head photoshopped onto the Lubavitcher Rebbe “Messiah is here” fliers that dot the city’s traffic lights.

Leon Rose (top left) and the Katz JCC boys’ basketball team at the 2004 JCC Maccabi Games, Washington DC. (Courtesy Rob Kiewe)

While the celebration this year has come in response to the Knicks’ on-court performance, Jewish groups have also previously celebrated Rose for his work off the court.

In June 2025, UJA-Federation of New York honored Rose as the recipient of the David J. Stern leadership award, named after the late commissioner of the NBA, who was Jewish. The award is given annually to a sports industry figure who “embodies Stern’s legacy of social responsibility, generosity and professional excellence.”

In the speech he gave while receiving the award, Rose said the honor “truly encapsulates the values and passions that have impacted my life: my family and the game of basketball.”

He continued, “It is, as has already been said, extra meaningful at such a crucial time in our people’s history.”

Back in 2009, the Katz JCC awarded Rose with its “JCC Athletics Lifetime Volunteer Award” after he’d spent six summers coaching various basketball teams, including ones that featured his son, Sam, and daughter, Brooke. Kiewe said Rose “believes in giving back, doing the right thing and teaching these kids the right way to play.” Occasionally, Rose would ask Kiewe to use a court for a tryout with a prospective client to see if they had NBA-level talent.

Meanwhile, Rose’s wife, Donna Rose, was also heavily involved in the program. “When we wanted to know what to do for uniforms, or figure out the practice schedule — ’Talk to Donna, she’s my GM,’” Kiewe recalled that Rose would say. Later, she played a key role when the Katz JCC hosted the Maccabi Games in 2014.

In 2009, the JCC made Rose the inaugural member of its own sports hall of fame, and the Philly Jewish Sports Hall of Fame inducted him two years later.

In 2023, the Katz JCC dedicated the name of its basketball court to the Rose family — led by Leon’s father and the Rose family patriarch, Zev — after they had donated an undisclosed sum of money to fix it up.

Leon Rose (second from right) with, from left to right, his brother Adam, his father Zev, and his nephew Noah, standing on the Rose Family Court. (Courtesy Katz JCC)

The elder Rose is something of a legend in the South Jersey Jewish community. Congregation Beth El in Voorhees honored Zev Rose with its lifetime service award last year, and he served on the board of the Jewish Federation of South Jersey. Zev Rose has become known for holding a victory cigar — unlit, since he doesn’t smoke — at Leon’s teams’ games.

In a recent interview, the elder Rose told Newsday that Leon, as a senior in college, told him about his aspirations to make a career as a basketball coach. He had played basketball all four years at Dickinson College, a liberal arts school in Pennsylvania, and would go on to be an assistant coach at his alma mater, Cherry Hill High School East. His father offered his support, as well as a dose of reality.

“He said he wants to be a coach, and I said, ‘Great, be a coach. But at least get a law degree and you have something to fall back on,’” Zev Rose said.

After taking his father’s advice, Leon Rose became a law partner at Sherman, Silverstein, Kohl, Rose and Podolsky, before pivoting and eventually joining CAA Sports as an agent.

Now, up 3-1 against the San Antonio Spurs in the Finals, his Knicks are on the brink of an NBA championship — something that would’ve been unthinkable when Rose took the helm of a franchise that had been floundering for two decades.

Back in the South Jersey Jewish community, where Rose’s roots are and his father and brother still live, rooting for the Knicks is something of a taboo, since it’s Philadelphia 76ers country.

“It’s a bit of a touchy subject,” Kiewe joked.

But, he continued, “Everybody loves Leon. There’s a lot of people that are not necessarily rooting for the Knicks — but they’re rooting for Leon.”

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At first, she resisted the idea. Sure, she was Jewish. But she didn’t grow up in a religiously observant family, and she insisted she didn’t know enough about Judaism to take on the project.

Finally, she relented. Drawing on a spark of an idea about a Holocaust time-travel fantasy, Yolen turned in the first draft of what would become “The Devil’s Arithmetic,” her 1988 young adult novel. “I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to try this,’” Yolen recalled to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency years later.

The book won immediate acclaim and garnered multiple awards. Today, it’s seen as a classic of the genre — and one that remains caught up in banned-book lists.

For Yolen, who died Thursday at 87 in her home in Western Massachusetts, “The Devil’s Arithmetic” became her signature title. Still in print, the book was also made into an Emmy Award-winning Showtime feature starring Kirsten Dunst. It was the cornerstone of a titanic legacy in children’s literature, her family said in a statement.

“It is with profound sadness that I, along with my brothers, Adam Stemple, and Jason Stemple, share the news of our mother, Jane Yolen’s passing,” her daughter Heidi Stemple wrote on Facebook, adding that Yolen had “passed gently with no pain or stress” and her family by her side, reading one of her books to her.

Yolen was born on Feb. 11, 1939, in New York City. Her father was a journalist and her mother was a psychiatric social worker until Yolen was born.

An alumna of Smith College, where she won poetry and journalism awards, she worked first as an editor in New York City, writing at her breaks and time off. Her first published book, “Pirates in Petticoats,” a nonfiction work about women on the high seas, was published when she was 22.

She soon pivoted to children’s literature, becoming one of the most prolific authors in the genre. She went on to publish 450 children’s books, including more Jewish titles, and was known as “the Hans Christian Andersen of America.” She won the prestigious Caldecott Medal for her 1987 picture book, “Owl Moon,” and her “How Do Dinosaurs …” series is a staple in many preschool classrooms. (It includes one Jewish title: “How Do Dinosaurs Say Happy Chanukah?” Her 450th title was published just this year, her children said.

But it was “The Devil’s Arithmetic,” scholars have said, that cemented her legacy as a leading author for young Jews. The novel was a trailblazer for its blending of time-travel with historical veracity, according to the late Norman H. Finkelstein, a National Jewish Book award winner who was a children’s librarian himself.

“It was a different Holocaust book,” Finkelstein told JTA in 2018, on the occasion of the title’s 30th anniversary. “It was not strictly factual, it was not a memoir. Jane did a superb job in taking the story of the Holocaust down to a level that ordinary American kids could understand. The characters were realistic, not paper cutouts.”

Other titles of hers included “Meet Me at the Well: The Girls and Women of the Bible,” with Barbara Diamond Goldin, and “Jewish Fairy Tale Feasts,” with her daughter Heidi, who developed and illustrated the hands-on recipes.

Yolen relished the collaborations with her daughter. They lived next door to each other, along with Stemple’s family, with two grandchildren who were taste-testers of Stemple’s recipes.

“Jane was a treasure, and it is difficult to think of the world of books — indeed the world itself – without her,” Richard Michelson, an award-winning author of Jewish children’s books and Yolen’s friend and neighbor, wrote on Facebook. Describing her as a cherished mentor of younger writers, he added, “Jane created classics as if it were as easy as breathing.”

While often assigned in schools as part of lessons on the Holocaust, Yolen’s titles are not without controversy. In 2025 a Texas school district, using artificial intelligence, flagged “The Devil’s Arithmetic” for removal as a title containing “DEI,” or diversity, equity and inclusion content. The book became one of several well known Holocaust titles to be pulled from schools in the last few years.

Though she had initially resisted the idea of being a Holocaust author, Yolen would go on to publish a trilogy of unconventional young-adult novels about the subject. She incorporated elements of “Sleeping Beauty” into 1992’s “Briar Rose.” “Mapping the Bones” followed in 2018 as a riff on “Hansel and Gretel.”

“Whenever we think of the Holocaust, we think of remembering,” Yolen told JTA in that same 2018 interview. “We think of never forgetting. Soon all we will have are the stories.”

In addition to her children, Yolen is survived by six grandchildren. Her husband, David Stemple, to whom she was married for 44 years, died in 2006.

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It was the latest escalation in a pitched battle between Hebrew Union College and the state attorney general’s office, which has accused HUC of violating nonprofit law by shuttering degree-granting programs on its historic Cincinnati campus.

The suit, HUC argues, “violates the First Amendment by entangling government and religion.”

The suit was originally filed in April by then-Ohio AG Dave Yost — his second against the college related to its controversial plan to wind down its Cincinnati operations in favor of its New York and Los Angeles campuses. Yost claimed HUC’s actions in Cincinnati misled its donors by leaving a city where they were actively fundraising to support operations, and also violated its charter, which states that the school would “permanently maintain” a residence there.  

The state seeks to seize HUC’s assets in Ohio and redirect them to a new, yet-to-be-decided nonprofit with a similar mission; an upstart rabbinical school founded by HUC alums says it wants them. 

Such a move “is an unconstitutional and illegal governmental assault upon religion,” HUC’s strongly worded motion reads. 

It continues, “The Attorney General has no role in dictating the religious affairs of institutions like HUC. The Court should reject his overreach into religious matters and should dismiss the Complaint because it is unconstitutional and unlawful.”

HUC also argues its vote to shutter the Cincinnati campus was done in full compliance with the law, adding that it intends to maintain the campus’s other assets, including the Klau Library, the American Jewish Archives and the Skirball Museum. In addition, citing a passage in the Torah that states “God will come to his people wherever they welcome him,” the school argues that considering “Jewish demographic realities” is part of its religious mission.

“These decisions were made thoughtfully and responsibly to ensure the long-term success of the institution and our ability to continue graduating strong Jewish leaders,” HUC president Andrew Rehfeld said in a statement accompanying the motion. The lawsuit, he added, “improperly seeks to interfere in the decisions of a religious organization, and this cannot be allowed to go unchallenged.”

Yost himself resigned as AG this week to join the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group that, in 2022, represented a Tennessee adoption agency that refused to foster a child to a Jewish couple. The suit against HUC continues under the state AG’s office.

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What you need to know today

• Dozens of pro-Israel activists rallied outside the Park Slope Food Coop on Thursday to protest the grocery store’s recent vote to boycott Israeli products. Some handed out Israeli snacks like Bamba that the coop has banned, reports The Times of Israel.

• After 70 Jewish girls got lost in a tunnel, antisemitic comments spread online. The girls, students from the Toras Emachu school in Monsey, New York, were visiting the Nyack Memorial Park on a school trip Wednesday when they entered a large drainage culvert and got lost in the tunnel system. Our Grace Gilson reports on the antisemitic comments that followed.

• Brad Lander knows that the Israel lobby is a popular target for conspiracy theorists. But the Jewish progressive, who is challenging Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman in the primary for New York’s 10th Congressional District on June 23, says he will continue criticizing AIPAC and Israel. “I feel queasy talking about it, given the antisemitic tropes at play here about Jews and money and power,” Lander told The New York Times. “But I have to.”

What’s on this weekend

• A historic synagogue in Astoria will celebrate 100 years on Sunday. The Astoria Center of Israel will mark its centennial anniversary with speakers including Rabbi Joshua Rabin, Chief FDNY Chaplain Rabbi Joseph Potasnik and Assemblymember David Weprin.

• Rivertowns Jewish Festival comes to the Dobbs Ferry waterfront on Sunday for its inaugural celebration on the Hudson, featuring live klezmer music, Israeli food, local vendors and kids’ activities.

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Then, on the first night of Hanukkah, everything in her life changed.

Gutnick was at a Hanukkah party in Melbourne, Australia, with her husband and three children when she crossed paths with a friend from Sydney. He looked ghostly white and told her there had been a shooting at a Hanukkah party in Bondi. Her parents, who were visiting Sydney from their home in Melbourne, had been planning to attend.

“I immediately called my dad, but he didn’t answer. Then I called my mum and she answered and I could hear shooting, and she was screaming and told me they are shooting people on the beach and that my dad is running after the terrorists,” said Gutnick.

Her father, Reuven Morrison, would be one of 15 people murdered on Bondi Beach that night. Before he was killed, Morrison was filmed throwing a brick at the terrorists, charging toward them with whatever he could find, trying to shield his community with his body. The footage of his bravery against the terrorists would be seen around the world within hours. After diverting the terrorist’s attention from others, Morrison bled out on the beach after being shot 11 times. He was 62.

“At 7:13 p.m. I found out that my dad is no longer alive, and my first reaction was to tell my husband to get me on a plane to Sydney,” she said. “As I was standing at the doorframe to leave the house before I went to the airport, I turned to my husband and said, ‘This is the day our lives have changed.’”

Gutnick boarded the last flight from Melbourne to Sydney that night. She couldn’t stop crying, and a flight attendant asked what was wrong. “I told her that my dad had just been killed in Bondi,” she recalled. “She didn’t really know what to say, but told me, if you need vodka let us know, we’ll sort you out.”

Six months after the attack, the deadliest antisemitic incident in Australia and one of the bloodiest anywhere in recent history, Australia is still reeling. A royal commission is unearthing searing allegations of antisemitism and accounts of Jewish fear, and has started rolling out recommendations designed to shore up public safety and cohesion.

Gutnick, meanwhile, has vaulted into public view not just at home but abroad. This week, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt posted a picture of himself with Gutnick on social media.

“I was honored to meet with Sheina Gutnick, daughter of Bondi hero Reuven Morrison z”l,” Greenblatt wrote. “Since Sheina’s father and 14 others were murdered by terrorists on Bondi Beach during Hanukkah, Sheina has tirelessly and relentlessly demanded that Australia take action against antisemitism. She is an inspiration.”

After throwing herself into speaking about her father, her experience and the challenges facing Australian Jews, Gutnick has now joined an international coterie of advocates transformed by their proximity to historic antisemitic violence.

“I get people saying to me, ‘Aren’t you exhausted?’” she said. “But the truth is, I get energy from it. I’m not a person that can sit when something has happened to me.”

The path that made Gutnick who she is was forged first in the former USSR, which Reuven Morrison left at 14 for Australia. Like many Soviet Jewish emigres, he knew little about Judaism when he arrived and for a time did not have much connection to Jewish practice in his new country, either.

But he became more religiously observant later in life, affiliating with the Chabad-Lubavitch movement that emphasizes outreach to Jews of all levels of observance. He became heavily involved in building Chabad of Bondi, a synagogue and community center in Sydney’s iconic beachfront neighborhood, helping to fight several legal battles while getting the building permits approved.

More than a decade ago, he moved to Melbourne. But the Sydney Jewish community, and especially Chabad of Bondi, remained close to his heart and he visited regularly. Its Chanukah by the Sea celebration, he decided, was one he would not miss.

Gutnick arrived in Sydney at 10 p.m., just a few hours after two men opened fire on the celebration, killing 15. Her father’s body still lay on Bondi beach, covered by a sheet, unable to be released for burial until all evidence had been collected from the scene of the massacre by Australian homicide detectives. She made her way to her uncle and aunt’s home, where her traumatized mother was waiting.

That night, nobody slept — and stories began trickling in.

“When I got there, we began hearing that my dad threw a brick at the terrorists. A lot of people started messaging me that he saved their lives based on actions that he took that night,” Gutnick recalled. “My mum had been on the beach and saw him running, and she saw when he went down, and she saw no one was helping and he ran to step in, but she hadn’t seen what he had actually done.”

An Australian homicide detective arrived at 1:30 a.m. to formally advise Gutnick and her mother Leah that Reuven had been murdered, and to explain the process for releasing his body back to the family for burial. It was slightly complicated, the detective told them, because this was Australia’s first major terrorist attack. The protocol was still being clarified.

“At this point, pure adrenaline and pure rage was running through my body, that this had actually happened. The fact that it was Bondi and it was my dad,” Gutnick recalled.

Gutnick returned to the apartment her parents owned in Sydney, situated right behind the Chabad of Bondi building, to collect a few things her mother needed. Outside, members of the Sydney Jewish community stood on the footpath alongside news crews and photographers. People on the street were crying.

Inside, Gutnick found her parents’ dog Simba who had come to Sydney with them, hungry and bewildered that he had been left alone since the night before. According to Jewish law, a Hanukkah menorah must be lit by each person in the place where they are spending the night. Reuven Morrison had set his up before leaving for the beach. On the table, it sat exactly where he had placed it, ready, unlit.

All the while, Gutnick’s phone kept ringing, with journalists asking her for comment. She felt, she recalls, like she was floating outside her own body.

“My mum was completely broken. Her world was torn apart; she has been with my dad for 42 years,” she recalled. “Every semblance of normal life was gone, she’s all of a sudden alone, she’s impacted in this way that is not humanely possible to comprehend.”

With dozens of media requests already flooding her phone, Gutnick ignored all of them — until she spotted one that was framed very differently.

The message came through Facebook from a producer at CBS News in the United States on Monday night, more than a day after the massacre, and it changed her life.

“I still hadn’t spoken to any media. They prefaced their message and said that they needed to help tell the world about my dad’s bravery, that they had seen the footage of him throwing a brick at the terrorists and they wanted to publicise it, so everyone knew about him and what he had done,” Gutnick recalled.

She felt compelled to respond: “It hit me so crushingly hard there is no one else to tell my dad’s story but me, so if I don’t do this, no one will hear about him and his bravery.

She messaged back, saying they could come to interview her the next morning. But CBS suggested they come right over immediately, in the middle of the night, so her interview could be aired on American prime time news. At 1 a.m., a full media crew arrived and Gutnick sat in front of lights that made her room feel like it was the middle of the day.

In the hours that followed, she wrote a personal reflection about what she believed her father’s death represented: a direct result of an Australian government that had been weak on antisemitism. After she circulated it, a prominent local Jewish figure whom she did not then know, the former treasurer of Australia, Josh Frydenberg, shared it on X, and it was republished widely. More media requests started flooding in and Gutnick started speaking about her dad.

“I realized how much I have on me to carry on my father’s legacy,” she said.

In between the interviews, she and her husband were on the phone to the Australian coroner and the chevra kadisha, the Jewish burial society, demanding that Australian authorities release her father’s body. A family friend, not knowing when the body would be released, flew his private plane from Melbourne to Sydney, ready to accompany Morrison home the moment his body was released. When that finally happened, a special flyover was arranged with the air controllers in Sydney so that the private plane with Morrison’s body could circle over Bondi Beach, in a final farewell to the place where Morrison had met his wife 42 years earlier.

Nobody who knew Sheina Gutnick Dec. 14 would have predicted what she’s done since. She says wouldn’t have predicted it either.

When Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese initially declined to call a royal commission into the Bondi attack and the broader rise of antisemitism in Australia, Gutnick, alongside other victim families, went to the front page of all of Australia’s major newspapers and called on him to reconsider. After weeks of lobbying, the prime minister relented.

When the royal commission convened, Gutnick was the first witness called to testify.

She described hearing “Free Palestine” shouted on the streets of Melbourne, chants that she said “not political expression but is explicit, targeted hatred and is designed to intimidate.” She recalled fearing the treatment her child would receive while undergoing surgery at a hospital where nurses had been fired after posting a viral video saying they would not treat Israeli patients. And she recounted being called a “f—ing terrorist” by a man she said had pointed at her Star of David necklace.

It was only one of countless stops to share her story. In the last six months, Gutnick has taken dozens of flights to meet with parliaments and groups to speak about her father and about Australian antisemitism. She has written in major national and international newspapers about her father and spoke at the Sydney reception for Israeli President Isaac Herzog.

She and her mother received condolence letters from across Australia and beyond. The one from King Charles, she said, was especially comforting. “He has an excellent team around him clearly, because it was such a beautiful, personalized letter, the one we received,” she said.

Her advocacy has been noticed at some of the highest levels within Australia’s Jewish community. “Sheina Gutnick never sought the public spotlight. She was thrust into it by the horrific murder of her father, and has responded with remarkable courage, dignity and moral clarity,” Jeremy Leibler, the president of the Zionist Federation of Australia, told JTA. “Her advocacy has resonated because it is authentic.”

Alex Ryvchin, the co-chair of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the peak body for Australian Jews, knew Reuven Morrison for years before he was killed. “He was an outstanding human being and now Australia knows him as a hero who gave his life to save others,” he told JTA. “Sheina honours his memory and legacy and I’m proud to stand with her in the fight against antisemitism.”

Rabbi Yehoram Ulman, the rabbi of Chabad of Bondi, whose son in law Rabbi Eli Schlanger and many close friends and congregants were murdered Bondi Beach also has deep appreciation for Gutnick’s advocacy.

She “emerged as one of the most compelling and eloquent new voices in Australia’s fight against antisemitism, transforming personal tragedy into sustained public advocacy,” he said.

After booking dozens of engagements independently, Gutnick was offered a role as the first public affairs officer of the recently established Australian branch of the Combat Antisemitism Movement, an international advocacy organization.

The group’s supporters argue that CAM is responding to a genuine rise in antisemitism and see it as trying to address problems that existing Jewish groups have failed to solve. They also argue that the group’s efforts to push back against anti-Israel sentiment are justified because anti-Zionism is often used as a vehicle for anti-Jewish prejudice.

CAM has indeed attracted criticism from other Jewish groups and civil liberties advocates who argue that it takes an overly broad approach to antisemitism and too often conflates anti-Zionism or criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

In Australia, the organization has also faced scrutiny over its political alliances, including relationships with some conservative and right-wing groups, as well as criticism that it imports American culture-war politics into debates about antisemitism.

Gutnick is aware of some of this criticism but isn’t really bothered by it. “Every organization has its controversial moments, so this stuff — it doesn’t really concern me,” she said. “The work CAM is doing now is so relevant in our lives in a post Oct.-7 world and a post-Bondi world,” she said.

In fact, she is grateful for the many connections they have helped her with both in Australia and around the world as well as their extensive research into antisemitism. “They gave me the ability to tell my dad’s story in many public spaces,” she said. “I continuously say, as Jews, we need to know the facts and figures on the ground about antisemitism, and what resolutions and legislation we need to have in place, and as an international org, CAM has the ability to help me do this.”

The royal commission has presented its first recommendations, designed to improve the processes that left the Bondi Hanukkah celebration with inadequate police protection despite the known threats. Soon, it is expected to say more — with a backlash to follow from those who believe that antisemitism is getting outsized attention and who say that efforts to address it will likely inappropriately constraint anti-Israel protest.

Gutnick doesn’t know exactly what the future will hold for her, but she knows that she will never return to where she stood six months ago — a spot that, in retrospect, feels like it may have been on the sidelines of the fight for Jewish security.

“As Jews, we are being faced with so much darkness,” she said. “I have gone through the worst thing — my father was killed for antisemitism — so I have become stronger, wanting to spread the message that no matter what happens, as the Jewish people we are one people, part of one faith, and although it’s terrible, this is something we have faced before.”

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Given this honorable heritage it’s perhaps surprising to discover that following a series of firebombings, shootings, beatings and death threats in the early 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. called St. Augustine “the most lawless community in which we have ever worked.”

In frustration, King reached out on June 17, 1964, to a Reform rabbi convention in Atlantic City seeking backup for his Southern Christian Leadership Council. He was eager to turn back racist mobs attacking Black activists trying to integrate local beaches. The civil rights icon also wanted to defend colleagues like Andrew Young who were  beaten back as they attempted to lead protests to St. Augustine’s historic slave market. 

What followed next was at the time the largest arrest of rabbis in American history, and perhaps a high point in the alliance of Black and Jewish civil rights activists ahead of the historic signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

Among the 16 rabbis immediately answering King’s call was 29 year-old Allen Secher. Earlier, I flew to Chicago to meet Secher, who has the bittersweet distinction of outliving his 15 fellow St. Augustine rabbis. He and his wife Ina, both 91, now lecture and teach widely on topics ranging from the Holocaust to elder independence. 

Following a series of subsequent meetings, they accepted my invitation to join me on a June flight back to St. Augustine for the 62nd anniversary of his arrest. Unlike better known civil rights landmark cities such as Selma, Birmingham and Memphis, the St. Augustine story largely remains a footnote. Secher and the families of the other 15 rabbis want a new generation to know what was won — and to feel the full weight of what is now being dismantled.

To mark the occasion and to help make that story better known, I have cowritten and produced a one-man show, “When The Rabbis Came To Town.” Adam Bell stars as Secher at its premier on June 17 at St. Augustine’s Waterworks Theater, after which the rabbi will join Bell for a post-show audience discussion. The play will also be staged July 13 at Temple Am Shalom in Glencoe, Illinois.

The play will revisit a story that reaches all the way back to the day Secher was cut from the high school golf team because Jews were banned from the local country club’s course. It also touches high points like his Brandeis days when he escorted trustee Eleanor Roosevelt in his beat up ’47 Chevy during a four day campus visit.  

Allen Secher was ordained by Hebrew Union College in 1962. (Courtesy Roger Rapoport)

He first met King in Albany, Georgia in 1962. By then a rabbi ordained at Hebrew Union College, Secher and other ministers and rabbis were arrested after a protest in front of the Albany city hall and locked up in a packed cell with a broken toilet. Bailed out after a week wading in sewage up to his ankles, he received a hero’s welcome back home in Long Island. 

Secher moved on to a new congregation in Mexico City, which went well until the day he began organizing a food drive for the homeless. “Do what you want, “ a local official told him. “Of course if you go ahead we’ll shoot you.”

By the time he answered King’s emergency appeal, Secher knew how to pack light for the segregated South, bringing along just a  toothbrush. Allegedly tipped off by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Ku Klux Klan members tailed Secher and his fellow rabbis on the drive from the Jacksonville airport to St. Augustine.

They were met with a standing ovation by King and the congregation at the local AME church before spending the night with families in the black Lincolnville district.

“Our hosts gave their marital bed to myself and Rabbi Hanan Sills,” said Secher.

The following afternoon, June 18, the rabbis and Al Vorspan, head of Reform Judaism’s Religious Action Center, were arrested for staging a prayer service protest in the parking lot of the segregated Monson Motor Lodge. Nearly at the same time, black and white teens were busted for attempting to integrate the adjacent motel pool. The latter incident made global headlines after the motel owner, James Brock, appeared to pour muriatic acid into the pool to burn the protesters.

The rabbis and teens were driven to the St. Augustine jail by special sheriff’s deputies recruited from the Klan.

Not everyone in the local Jewish community welcomed the rabbis’  efforts. That evening the angry president of a local synagogue burst into the defendants’ packed 100 degree cell. After addressing them as “kike rabbis” he urged the men, now stripped down to their underwear, to tone down their prayers lest they disturb the sleeping deputies.

Rabbi Allen Secher and his wife Ina continue to lecture and teach widely on topics ranging from the Holocaust to elder independence. (Courtesy Roger Rapoport)

Secher said that later that night he suggested they write what became their “Why We Went” letter, started in jail and published on June 19, 1964. 

“We came because we could not stand quietly by our brother’s blood. We had done that too many times before,” they wrote. “We came as Jews who remember the millions of faceless people who stood quietly, watching the smoke rise from Hitler’s crematoria. We came because we know that, second only to silence, the greatest danger to man is loss of faith in man’s capacity to act.

(On June 18, Secher and Avi Dresner, the son of Rabbi Israel Dresner, who recruited rabbis to the Florida protest, will read the “Why We Went” letter in front of St. Augustine’s infamous jail. This event is sponsored by the St. Augustine Jewish Historical Society.)

On June 19, 1964, the Senate, besieged with constituent calls after the St. Augustine incidents, passed Lyndon Johnson’s long delayed Civil Rights Act 73 to 27. The president signed the bill on July 2 with King looking on.

While many Jews look back with pride on the Jewish contributions to a desegregated South, some of the rabbis, like Secher’s roommate, Hanan Sills, discovered targets on their backs. On returning to Milwaukee he found the windows of his home and synagogue had been shattered and bullet holes in his car. Both he and his children received a series of death threats. 

In a blistering editorial the B’nai Brith Messenger accused the 16 rabbis of “trading shul for pool, literally wading into the rights battle… with no yarmulkes. Martin Luther King gets better mileage out of some of our rabbis than do our congregations.”

“Johnson’s bill signing in July 1964 triggered racist bombings of the newly desegregated Monson Motel,” Secher remembered. “In effect the new law of the land was the beginning of a battle aimed at defending what we achieved.”

Since his jail time in St. Augustine Secher has dedicated his life to tikkun olam, repairing the world. He served as a rabbi in Los Angeles and Chicago.  In addition to producing an award-winning Auschwitz documentary and advocating for diversity and inclusion, he worked especially hard in Montana where he made a failed attempt to retire with Ina in 2000.

For a time the state’s sole rabbi, he began working successfully with congregations statewide on a host of civil rights and racism issues. One of his antagonists in his new home town, Whitefish, was the inflammatory Richard Spencer, the alt right white nationalist and one of the leaders of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. 

Sitting with Allen Secher at 91, I kept thinking about what it costs a person to show up — not once, but across a lifetime. The “Why We Went” letter he helped draft in a sweltering jail cell remains one of the most dignified, and prescient, documents of that pivotal era. “We do not underestimate what yet remains to be done, in the north as well as the south,” they wrote. “In the battle against racism, we have participated here in only a skirmish.”

Sixty-two years later, the victories those rabbis helped secure are under open assault. Secher knows this. It is why he came back to St. Augustine, why he agreed to have his story told on a stage, why he will stand in front of that jail on June 18 and read the letter aloud again.  

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Halpern didn’t understand. Who were the Zionists? One classmate said, “The Jews.”

“But I’m a Jew,” said Halpern. Her classmates looked at her in disbelief. She couldn’t be, one said. She had no horns.

Halpern was about to be swept up in a spiral of social and political crises in communist Poland, culminating in a government-sponsored antisemitic campaign that stripped Jews of their jobs, schools and citizenship, forcing some 13,000 to leave the country. Within months, Halpern would find herself renouncing her Polish nationality and leaving everything she knew for a new life in the United States.

At that moment, when her classmates read the word “Zionists” and looked up at her with horror, she felt a shift.

“It sort of evoked a lot of distrust and fear, that somehow there were all these people around that were going to do some harm to the Polish people,” Halpern told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Now 79 years old, Halpern joined a group of Polish emigrants and their children who traveled to Poland in April to unwind the trauma of 1968. Their meeting was organized by the Engaged Memory Consortium, a collection of organizations dedicated to Polish Jewish heritage, and funded by Poland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

It was the first time that the government paid for a trip to reckon with the events of 1968 and invited the Jews whose lives were upended, according to the program’s coordinator, Patrycja Dołowy.

The nine participants came from Sweden, Denmark and the United States. Over eight days, they visited Jewish sites and community groups in Warsaw, Wrocław and Łódź. These three areas hosted the largest groups of Jews who remained in Poland after the Holocaust, where they decided to rebuild — and where their communities were decimated again in 1968. Though the members of the trip had never met, their memories overlapped, patching together a dark open wound in the history of Polish Jews.

It’s a chapter that remains obscure among many Poles and Jewish communities around the world, partly because of a myth that Jewish life was wholly extinguished by the Holocaust, according to Karen Auerbach, a historian of Polish Jews at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“There’s such limited understanding of the fact that there was a Jewish population in Poland after the Second World War, that this doesn’t rise to the surface,” said Auerbach.

The Jewish flight of 1968 started with two words from Władysław Gomułka, then the leader of communist Poland. Days after Israel’s victory over Soviet-supported Arab countries in the Six-Day War of 1967, Gomułka said that Poland would not tolerate a “fifth column” of Polish Jews. The phrase signaled that Jews could be loyal to Israel and treasonous to Poland. Soon after, the communist secret police purged Jews from state and party apparatuses, especially the army.

This campaign exploded after Poland, like other countries across the globe, was rocked by youth uprisings in March 1968. Polish students demonstrated against state censorship and the growing restriction of their civil liberties under Gomułka. Thousands were detained, expelled from universities and dismissed from their jobs in the ensuing government crackdown. Some of the students were Jewish. That became the pretext for Polish authorities to accuse them of “Zionism,” pinning the demonstrations on a global Jewish conspiracy.

The government organized “anti-Zionist” rallies and stoked fear of “Zionists” in official propaganda, avoiding the word “Jew.” Newspapers outed “Zionists” to their neighbors. A new wave of purges expelled thousands of Jews from their jobs and exposed them to antisemitic attacks in their cities and towns. Jews were pressured to leave the country, and when they applied for exit documents, they were forced to renounce their Polish citizenship.

The purges were not only executed by government order, but also by ordinary Polish citizens who took advantage of the campaign and antisemitic sentiment to further their careers, said Dariusz Stola, director of the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

“It was opening opportunities for many people for advancement,” said Stola. “Say you compete for a position in your institution, and you have a Jewish colleague, why not accuse him of being a hidden Zionist? Or you have some accounts to settle from the past — you don’t like someone — let’s accuse him of Zionism, because the burden of proof he is not is on him.”

By the early 1970s, half the country’s Jews were gone, crushing a community that was tenuously growing back decades after the Holocaust. The campaign effectively ended organized Jewish life in Poland.

Fifty-eight years later, Dołowy guided Polish emigrants and their descendants through cultural institutions that have emerged to preserve Jewish history, culture and communal life since the fall of the Soviet Union, from the Polin Museum in Warsaw to the Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in Łódź. She also introduced them to Jews, like herself, whose families remained in Poland after 1968.

Rachelle Halpern, right, and other participants in the Miszpucha Foundation trip visit the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Poland. (Adam de Kaminski)

Dołowy is the former head of Warsaw’s Jewish Community Center and the founder of the Miszpucha Foundation. A part of the Engaged Memory Consortium, this foundation aims to strengthen ties between Jews in Poland and Jews who left, particularly those driven out in 1968. Dołowy arranged meetings between the emigrants and Jews who stayed in Poland — artists from the Kultur-Lige network in Wrocław, cultural event organizers for the nonprofit HaKoach in Łódź, and Jews in Warsaw who ranged from academics to entrepreneurs to JCC coordinators.

In 1968, Dołowy’s father was expelled from his university and lost permission to continue his PhD. The question of whether to stay or leave Poland split her parents from their families and friends. Half the Jews they knew chose to leave, dividing what she called the “miszpucha” — the Polish spelling of the Hebrew “mishpacha” and the Yiddish “mishpokhe,” meaning “family.”

Despite this rupture, Dołowy said she rarely saw the antisemitic campaign reflected in Polish history, beyond the hushed stories in Jewish families. Shame and confusion swirled around the events of 1968 for many Jews who considered themselves Polish, but were told by their government and their neighbors that they were not.

“I believe that this generation’s story is still something really silenced,” said Dołowy. “We don’t really talk about 1968, or if we talk about it, we don’t really know the words to describe what actually happened to us, to our community.”

Halpern was 22 when her family left in December 1968 to join a relative in Boston. Despite the Soviet propaganda that said Polish Jews harbored a suspicious bond to Israel, only some 3,000 actually went there. Most of the 13,000 emigrants fled to Sweden, Denmark and the United States, where Cold War-era programs welcomed political refugees from the communist bloc.

Waves of Polish Jewish survivors had migrated to Israel after the Holocaust. But many of those who remained by 1968 were secular and committed to life in Poland, with dwindling ties to Jewish religion, Israel and Zionism, according to Stola. Many were dedicated communists or socialists.

“We know that only a minority of them went to Israel, despite attempts to convince them,” he said.

To obtain exit permits, Halpern and other Jews were forced to declare the intention of going to Israel. Then they received a travel document that rendered them stateless.

“It looked like a regular identity document — a photograph, first name, family name, date of birth,” said Stola. “And the most important part of the document were letters at the bottom of the page saying, ‘The bearer of this document is not a citizen of the Polish People’s Republic.’ To my knowledge, this is the only identity document that says who you are not.”

Halpern gave up her Polish nationality together with her sister in an emigration office. She remembers everything as “gray” — the day, the Polish official and the room with a small window.

“We were looked at as if we were hostile people, enemies,” she said. “We had to stand there, and you had to raise your hand and say that you are renouncing your Polish citizenship. We cried and cried and cried.”

Still, Halpern almost stayed in Poland. Just before her family left Szczecin on an overnight train to Warsaw for the first leg of their journey, she ran away. Seized by fear and anxiety about losing the world she knew, she slept at a friend’s house that night. She woke up in the early hours with the realization that she had nothing left in Poland — no citizenship, no money, no university and no family. She caught up with her parents just before their next train departed from Warsaw to Vienna.

Halpern went to medical school in Boston and made her career as a doctor in California, then Colorado. She did not visit Poland again until 2007, nearly 40 years later.

Other young Jews leapt at the opportunity to leave in 1968. Wladimir Mietek Szpirt, another participant in the Miszpucha Foundation trip, was just starting medical school in Szczecin at 18 years old. He found a hostile environment at the university. When he heard Gomułka threaten the “fifth column,” he decided to apply for asylum in Denmark. For him, leaving Poland meant the chance to freely study medicine, develop his career and build a stable life.

But Szpirt’s parents were stuck. They lost their jobs as accountants at state institutions, and authorities said they knew too much state information to leave the country. Szpirt emigrated alone, uncertain when he would see his parents again. Nearly two years later, they managed to follow him to Denmark.

Szpirt recently retired from his long career as a doctor in Copenhagen. Like Halpern, he returned in April to the place where the first chapter of his life closed. Now in his later years, Szpirt reflected on growing closest to his origin by leaving it behind.

“In Denmark, I was always accepted as a Pole,” said Szpirt. “The funny thing is that for the first 18 years of my life, I was not accepted as a Pole in Poland. But in Denmark, I became a doctor who was born in Poland. I was not a Jew from Poland.”

Wladimir Mietek Szpirt at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland. (Shira Li Bartov)

Many Jews never went back to Poland after the antisemitic campaign. Eliza Fishenfeld grew up in New York City with parents who fled in 1969 and 1974. The Miszpucha Foundation offered her first trip to Poland as the child of emigrants who were “very angry and very hurt,” she said. They decided not to return.

Fishenfeld lived in a displaced Polish Jewish world in New York. All of her parents’ friends were other Polish Jews affected by 1968, she said. They connected through the network of Jewish schools and camps from their childhood in Poland.

“I know they loved Poland before ‘68, because they told me so many stories about it and they were always so happy, and all their friends were from Poland,” said Fishenfeld. “Our community was the Polish Jewish emigré community.”

Fishenfeld said that arriving in Poland felt like a “homecoming of sorts,” though it was nothing like the communist country her parents remembered. She called them daily to describe the trip, but at their age now, she said they no longer travel.

The campaign didn’t only destroy Jewish communities. It also hollowed out Poland’s cultural and intellectual life, as Jews disappeared from universities, medical schools and hospitals, according Joanna Podolska, the former director of the Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in Łódź. She said their absence left visible holes in the city.

“We didn’t have so many well-educated people, so it was a difficult moment,” said Podolska. “Young people who could work for the city, for Poland, they became citizens of other countries. They were doctors, filmmakers, advocates, chemists, researchers, artists. Probably, Poland would be much richer as a country — more important — with these people who left.”

Decades after the 1968 campaign, it remains a sensitive subject in Polish politics. From 2015 to 2023, Poland was governed by the nationalist-conservative Law and Justice party, which promised to revive Poland’s pride in its past and eradicate what officials called a “pedagogy of shame.”

The narrative stifled research into Poland’s Holocaust history, particularly concerning instances of Polish antisemitism and Polish people who killed Jews or cooperated with the Nazi regime. Poland passed a law in 2018 that outlawed accusing Poland or the Polish people of complicity in Nazi crimes.

But the government also lashed out at a 2018 exhibition about 1968 in the Polin Museum. The exhibition called “Estranged” closed with a wall of quotes, which combined antisemitic and xenophobic statements from 1968 and 2018. Though the quotes were unattributed, two belonged to members of the ruling party.

The exhibition infuriated government officials, and former culture minister Piotr Gliński accused Stola of imposing “very aggressive politics” on the museum. Stola was pushed out as the director in 2019 despite winning a competition to extend his tenure. (In March, he was reinstated under Poland’s new government, led by centrist Prime Minister Donald Tusk.)

Anat Plocker, a lecturer at Stockton University, said that Polish officials in 1968 defined a form of antisemitic rhetoric that echoes among Polish nationalist politicians to this day.

“The way they talk about the memory of the Holocaust, Jewish power, questions of who is really behind what’s going on in Poland — it’s really the Jews or it’s really a conspiracy of the West against Poland — all of this discourse became so important in Polish politics in ‘68,” said Plocker. “So what we see is that politicians are repeating, really sometimes word by word, the same phrases that were used against Jews in ’68.”

Eight years after the backlash to “Estranged,” Dołowy said she was proud to have garnered funding from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the Miszpucha Foundation trip. She hopes to arrange more trips for 1968 emigrants, so they can share their long-obscured stories while they still have the chance.

“These emigrants from 1968 became the generation of grandparents, so this is actually a very good moment for them to tell the story to be listened to by our children,” said Dołowy.

In 2007, Halpern learned about the Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków and went to Poland for the first time since leaving home. She has returned since then to attend the festival and Holocaust commemoration events, but she found that most of the other attendees were also visiting from abroad. “They are not people that are actually being Jews here,” she said.

That was why Halpern joined the Miszpucha Foundation trip. She was not interested in rehashing her parents’ Holocaust survival or reliving her own loss in 1968. Instead, she wanted to meet people like Dołowy — the other half of the “miszpucha” who stayed and created new lives.

“I didn’t really want to repeat the story of what happened to my mother, what happened to my father, what happened to the families,” said Halpern. “It was all more walking on people’s destroyed lives. So I wanted to see what is alive.”

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The Board of Deputies of British Jews called the paper posted by the National Association of Muslim Police “disturbing” in its presentation of Jewish identity, history and the nature of antisemitism.

“If this is being circulated among officers, it poses a direct challenge to the integrity of policing and it should be withdrawn immediately,” the group said.

NAMP has distanced itself from the report and, in a statement, rejected any allegation that the group “supports Hamas.”

The 39-page paper titled “From Past Prejudices to Present Policies: Confronting anti-Muslim hatred and Promoting Human Rights,” was written by NAMP’s then-vice president, Khaldoun Kabbani, and published in July 2025. It says “Zionism represents one of the manifestations of anti-Muslim hatred”; likens the war in Gaza to the Holocaust; and disputes facts about Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, including that Israeli children were killed.

The Spectator, a right-wing British newspaper, drew attention to the report in a piece published on Friday that said the report illuminated “the disturbing truth about the National Association of Muslim Police.” The group has a formal affiliation with 16 of 43 police departments in the U.K. and says it represents more than 20,000 officers.

Kabbani, a forensics officer, was briefly the chair of the Scottish Muslim Police Association but planned to move abroad after retiring earlier this year, according to a post by the group on LinkedIn.

The revelation of the NAMP report comes at a time of heightened tension over policing in the U.K., amid both a surge in anti-Jewish crimes and a renewed uproar over a December murder that has fueled allegations of “two-tier policing” that treats some victims differently from others. The Spectator referenced the victim, Henry Nowak, in the column about NAMP.

The NAMP report has spurred distress for many British Jews who are on edge amid a string of violent incidents targeting Jewish communities. The Campaign Against Antisemitism, a watchdog group, said its polling shows that 83% of British Jews do not think the police are doing enough to protect them — and that the report suggested their concerns were well founded.

“The people responsible for publishing this extremist screed on the official police.uk web domain are unfit to be police officers and must be immediately investigated by their respective forces’ professional standards departments and dismissed,” Steven Silverman, CAM’s director of investigations and enforcement, said in a statement.

“British Jews have long suffered two-tier policing that sees antisemitic crime go unpunished,” he said, adding that CAM would press the British government “ensure a clear message is being sent. This cannot pass with the document being quietly deleted.”

The report was removed from NAMP’s website over the weekend. The group distanced itself from the report in a statement published on Tuesday, saying that it had removed the report “immediately” after learning about its existence and emphasizing that the author was “no longer associated” with NAMP.

“We understand that the publication of this document has affected several communities, and we regret any concern, discomfort, or misunderstanding it may have caused,” the group said.

It added, “NAMP categorically does not ‘defend’ Hamas or any other proscribed organisation. We condemn all forms of terrorism and extremism.”

The document is “deeply troubling,” a spokesperson for the Jewish Leadership Council, which coordinates British Jewish groups, said in a statement.

“This document appears to falsely associate an ideology held by the majority of Jewish people as a threat to Muslims. It also engages in deeply troubling Holocaust inversion and denial of some of the worst atrocities carried out by Hamas on October 7th,” the spokesperson said. “At a time of rising antisemitism including violent attacks on British Jews, this document further threatens community cohesion and police forces should be clear in distancing themselves from it.”

The Board of Deputies of British Jews said it plans to speak with the “relevant” government and police departments to discover the paper’s provenance, how it’s being used and “how to ensure that the valued relationships of trust between British Jews and the police are not being undermined.”

The Metropolitan Police of London, the largest police department in the U.K. and a formal NAMP affiliate, declined to comment on the report. The department has recently stepped up policing in Jewish communities in an effort to stem antisemitic violence.

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The commercial shows the 53-year-old Oscar-winning actress and lifestyle entrepreneur waking up in a New York luxury high-rise apartment and going for a run through the city. At the end of the commercial she says, “There’s a reason the most iconic buildings are built by a park.” She then asks her driver to take her to “51 Park.”

When he responds, “New York?” she smiles and responds, “Herzliya, Israel.”

It was a bold statement of connection with Israel at a time of widespread anxiety among many pro-Israel Jews about whether Hollywood remains hospitable to them, and as some A-list celebrities with track records of engaging with Israel distance themselves.

Criticism against Paltrow quickly erupted on social media, with pro-Palestinian activists decrying what they saw as tone-deafness in promoting luxury Israeli properties at a time when many of them believe Israel has perpetrated a genocide in Gaza. (Israel denies the allegation.)

“Gwyneth ‘I don’t feel anything’ Paltrow is promoting million-dollar condos in Israel, during an active genocide,” the account Saint Hoax told its 3.4 million followers on Instagram, in a widely shared post. (The comment quoted Paltrow’s remarks this week describing her political outlook.)

Saint Hoax called the actress “Gwynicide Paltrow” and said the ad represented the “goopification of settler colonialism,” a reference to Paltrow’s lifestyle brand Goop.

Raven Schwam-Curtis, an anti-Zionist Jewish influencer, made a similar point on TikTok — adding that she believed Paltrow’s appearance was antithetical to Jewish values.

“In a moment where Israel has displaced millions of Lebanese and Palestinian people, unalived countless folks, and literally committed a genocide, doing an advertisement for luxury real estate near miles from a flattened Gaza is a very bizarre decision,” Schwam-Curtis said in her post on Wednesday. She added, “Do y’all really not see how all this behavior is morally and intellectually inconsistent with the fundamental values we are supposed to share as a Jewish people?”

Schwam-Curtis joined a number of social media users in pointing out that Herzliya is named for Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, and in noting Paltrow’s history of affiliation with Hadassah, the Zionist woman’s organization. Paltrow’s mother-in-law was the group’s national president from 2007 to 2011, and Paltrow has spoken at Hadassah events.

“That whole family is as Zionist as it gets,” one representative commenter wrote. “Paltrow is not tone deaf, she is just proudly advertising her Jewish supremacism.”

Paltrow’s management did not respond to a request for comment. But the head of the Israeli ad agency that created the campaign for real estate developer Aviv Melisron said the actor was a perfect match for the Park 51 project.

“To bring this architectural masterpiece to the Israeli audience, we needed a figure who effortlessly embodies international elegance, a premium lifestyle, and uncompromising quality,” Gabi Attal of the agency Why Worry posted on LinkedIn. “Enter Academy Award, Emmy, and Golden Globe winner Gwyneth Paltrow.”

Attal did not disclose how much Paltrow was compensated for her appearance. He and Melisron did not respond to requests for comment.

Bertha Merikanskas, a senior publicist at Newsroom PR in Los Angeles who has lived in Israel, said she was unsurprised that Paltrow embraced an Israeli project.

“Gwyneth is one of the few A-list celebrities who has been outspoken about her support for Israel since Oct. 7 and has embraced her Jewish roots publicly,” Merikanskas told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. She added, “It’s refreshing to see A-listers who refuse to bow to pressure.”

Paltrow is the daughter of the late director and producer Bruce Paltrow, who was Jewish and descended from a rabbinical dynasty, and her husband is Jewish. Her brother Jake directed the 2022 film “June Zero” about the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann. The movie was shot in Israel and filmed in Hebrew.

After Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Paltrow spoke out repeatedly on behalf of the Israeli hostages held in Gaza and, in 2024, publicly participated in a Hanukkah video campaign alongside the Israeli actress and activist Noa Tishby, who for a period was an official spokesperson for Israel in the United States.

“It should come as no surprise,” Merkianskas said, “that she’s not afraid of her name being associated with Israel.”

Paltrow also has a record of weathering barrages of negative public opinion. She has drawn criticism for many of the products promoted by Goop; for saying she “consciously uncoupled” from her ex-husband, Coldplay frontman Chris Martin; and lamenting that she “lost half a day of skiing” in court while responding to a lawsuit from a fellow skier who said she had hurt him when she crashed into him on the slopes in Park City, Utah.

Immediately before the Park 51 ad dropped, Paltrow had ignited criticism from progressives after describing her current political outlook in a June 2 episode of her “Goop Podcast.” The actress who once hosted fundraisers for the Democratic Party offered a summary that could feel familiar to those who have described themselves as “politically homeless” amid surging anti-Israel sentiment among Democrats.

“I’m pretty centrist and my husband thinks I’m a Republican. But I think it’s — which I’m not a Republican,” Paltrow said. “I don’t feel anything right now, to be totally honest with you. I feel like I’m completely an independent.”

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Reses, who’s been in his role since Vance and President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, is perhaps the closest Jewish official in Vance’s orbit. He has had a close relationship with the vice president since Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign in Ohio. 

A source familiar with the matter confirmed NBC News’ initial report that Reses informed Vance of his decision months ago, after his wife became pregnant. Vance said in a statement on Thursday that he will “miss him dearly, but he won’t be far, and I plan to keep his counsel close until our paths cross again.” Reses’ plans for his next role are currently unknown.

Vance has recently drawn the ire of some Jewish Republicans who say that he has refused to confront antisemitism on the right, including from former Fox news host Tucker Carlson. (Carlson’s son was also a Vance staffer until April, when he left to set up a political consulting firm.) A New York Magazine profile published in March suggested that Reses was on board with Vance’s approach, and revealed that Reses used his private X account to amplify voices calling on Jews to embrace, rather than resist, the Christian nationalist current surging within the GOP.

Reses has been “by my side for my whole career in public life,” Vance said in a statement.

“I can’t imagine having been on this life-changing journey without him,” Vance said. “From day one of my time as a Senator-elect, I could not have asked for a more loyal and discerning advisor and friend as my chief of staff.”

The personal bond between the two men was on display in January, when Vance took part in Reses’ wedding to Rachel Altman at a synagogue in Rockville, Maryland, delivering a Jewish prayer under the chuppah. Chabad of Princeton University, Reses’ alma mater, posted a photo of the couple with the vice president, celebrating the occasion as an expression of Jewish pride.

That closeness, and Reses’ reported alignment with Vance’s stance on right-wing antisemitism, have not spared Reses from becoming a target of antisemites. In one instance, a white-nationalist website ran an article about him headlined, “Another Nail in the Coffin — Jew Runs J. D. Vance.”

A Jewish Telegraphic Agency profile published in 2024, when Vance was selected as Trump’s running mate, traced Reses’ Jewish identity and his journey from a Democratic-leaning Jewish teenager in southern New Jersey, whose grandfather escaped the Holocaust in Lithuania, to one of the most influential conservatives in Washington. His trajectory included internships for Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, a political conversion at Princeton and stints at the Heritage Foundation and in the office of Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley.

On Thursday, Republican leaders and Trump administration officials sang Reses’ praises in statements shared with JTA.

“Jacob Reses has been an invaluable, loyal, and trusted hand to Vice President Vance and President Trump,” said Matt Brooks, CEO of the Republican Jewish Coalition. “As a proud Jewish American, whose own family story carries the weight of our people’s history, Jacob brought both conviction and clarity to one of the most consequential roles in Washington.” Brooks added that the RJC has “no doubt he will continue to play a critical role moving forward.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who’s seen as a possible challenger to Vance for the 2028 presidential nomination, said that Reses served Vance and the entire administration “with distinction,” and that he “understands the moment we’re in and he spent every day fighting to deliver results for the President.”

Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, said he was proud to have Reses “by my side in negotiating some of the toughest deals for the President.”

“Don’t let Jacob fool you — beneath his kind exterior he’s a killer,” Witkoff said. “It’s been a delight to get to know him through the Vice President, and our foreign adventures from Israel to Pakistan have been historic.” 

He added, “We haven’t seen the last of him.”

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“She never used the word with me again,” Pryor, whose father is Black, recalled to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency of her mother, who belonged to the Jewish socialist group Workman’s Circle. “But she never apologized.”

The incident stuck with Pryor, today a history professor at Smith College, for many years — and not just because of the source of the remark. Pryor is the daughter of Richard Pryor, the beloved comedian and actor whose life’s work interrogated the various forms of American racism, including the N-word. Richard had deployed the word frequently in his act (as well as in the Mel Brooks movie “Blazing Saddles,” which he co-wrote) before swearing off the word entirely. 

At the same time, Pryor’s mixed-race and Jewish identity meant she was never far from one prejudice or another. Her parents never married, and she was not her father’s only Jewish daughter. As she grew up, each side of her family and social circle would make bigoted remarks about the other. In the Los Angeles bat mitzvah scene in the 1970s, her Jewish classmates would make ceaseless remarks about her race. Haunted by her mother’s leveraging of the N-word against her, Pryor at one point preemptively told her classmates to call her the word.

Now Pryor has blended these personal histories with her research in a new memoir, “Something We Said: Richard Pryor: A Notorious Word, And Me,” which takes its inspiration from her Smith classes and a viral TED talk she gave in 2020. While recounting a history of the N-word itself, Pryor also recounts her own split upbringing, including how she came into both her Black and Jewish identities.

She spoke with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about her time in Jewish spaces; the N-word’s Yiddish equivalent; and her reaction to “Blazing Saddles,” which she avoided seeing until adulthood.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

JTA: You talk in the book about how you struggled with the mixed aspects of your parents, and you end at a place where you’re embracing both. How did you get there, and how do you understand your Jewish identity today?

Pryor: I’ve had so many different iterations of my Jewish identity. Certainly as a little kid, I didn’t know there was such a thing as observant Judaism. My grandmother always lit the candles, and my grandfather had all of his grandchildren named in the local synagogue, but not until I got to L.A. [after an early childhood in Boston] did I realize like people observed this more broadly.

At the same time, I was just always Jewish. You didn’t have to not be all Jewish because you were Black, in the way we spoke about it in my house. I remember my mom, when we got to L.A., she had me join a temple, like the beginnings of Hebrew school, and none of the kids there were interracial or biracial. They were all white kids, and nobody could understand [me]. They were like, “Are you adopted? Wait, how does a Black person become Jewish?” And I do think that’s something that I’ve run across a lot of my life.

I’ve always loved being Jewish. When I had kids, I had the same experience with them. I was like, “Your mother’s Jewish, so you’re Jewish, that’s it.” And they went to Jewish day schools, and one of my kids actually had a real coming-of-age in her Judaism. When she did her junior year abroad in Jerusalem, people would still ask her the same kind of questions: “Oh, your mother’s Black, was she adopted?” All these years later, she was still getting those questions.

But one of the things that I actually love: I’m a TikTok fanatic, and there are a lot of Black Jewish women on TikTok who talk about this experience of feeling 100% Jewish and owning it. And I love that, because I don’t feel like there was a lot of space for me to do that growing up.

My sister, who grew up in L.A. with Jewish grandparents as well, and a Jewish mother, they were a lot more observant. [Elizabeth’s half-sister, Rain Pryor, is an actor and comedian who has toured a play, “Fried Chicken and Latkes,” based on her upbringing.] So she had a much more observant Jewish experience than I did, and in some ways a much Blacker experience than I did.

By far the hardest part of the book for me to read was your description of your mother calling you the N-word. It was so painful, seeing those words on the page. How do you understand that, reflecting on it today? Do you think she carried hate in some way?

My mother was a fighter and scrappy as all get out, and resented all the boxes she’d been put in. I think sometimes about how hard it must have been for her to be as in love with my father as she had once been, and then see his star on the rise in such a big way. And I know she loved me, but she fought dirty. And in her mind, she wasn’t getting or hearing what she wanted, and I know that’s why she did it. She never used the word with me again. But she never apologized. “Oh, please, Elizabeth, that was five years ago.” She just couldn’t, when I brought it up — and I brought it up a lot.

I think what is deeper about racism, more broadly, is that my mother was not actively a racist, but obviously had deeply embedded racist ideas about the world. She could think that there was a universe in which it was OK to call your child that.

Gene Wilder and Cleavon Little appear in a scene from 1974’s “Blazing Saddles.” (Courtesy Fathom)

I want to talk about “Blazing Saddles.” I saw it when I was very young, because I was obsessed with Mel Brooks and Jewish comedy. And because of that, the movie was my first exposure to the N-word –

How interesting! That just gave me the chills.

So your dad, in addition to spending his career interrogating the N-word, part of his legacy may also just be introducing the concept of the word to future generations. I’m wondering what you make of that?

One of the things about “Blazing Saddles” that I learned, that makes perfect sense, and I feel like I knew organically after I saw it finally, was that pretty much any time the N-word appears, it’s my father’s creation. Because Mel Brooks was like, “I didn’t want to use the word,” and my father insisted that the word was at the core of the kind of satire that Mel Brooks was trying to spotlight — and that the reason to use it is because of how ridiculous white people are going to sound when they do. It’s not because we’re using the N-word to, you know, disparage people, but we’re using it to make fun of the white racists in the film. 

But you know, people of your generation are coming across the word differently than people of mine. I’m 59, so I was on the schoolyard, kids were singing along with it. But I think I’m less surprised that the place you learn about that kind of racism is from a Black creator. He’s making fun of a type of racism that you have never witnessed, at that point in your life.

I have mixed feelings about it. It is very funny, but I don’t know, there are some things that don’t always stand the test of time.

Something else that’s in both the movie and your memoir is, if you’ll excuse me, the word “Schvartze.” Do you have any thoughts about the use of that specifically Yiddish word that is used to demean Black people?

I debated using it in the book. That was a hard one. I did not want to be, like, “The s-word.” I had some feelings about having done it — and people shouldn’t use that word, either. Maybe that’s ideally just kind of understood as the N-word. One of my cousins and maybe my aunt said it while driving through Mattapan Square, which was the Black part of Boston that was right by us, and they’d start describing the people who live there in this way. I think that is pretty dehumanizing.

My father has a joke, and I reference it in the book: “They’ve got the Vietnamese coming over here in refugee camps, and they’re teaching them how to say the N-word, so they can become good citizens.” I have a lot of colleagues who study whiteness, and at the core of many of those processes is anti-Blackness. If you learn who you are in [relation] to Black people, then you can kind of enter into whiteness in the United States. So I grew up with at least a casualness around the use of that word.

And your Jewish family would use it around you, but they weren’t referring to you specifically?

Exactly. They weren’t referring to me, never.

What do you make of that?

I think for many people racism is abstract and anti-Blackness is abstract. You’re afraid of, like, a creature lurking around the corner. It’s the unknown, and it’s kind of faceless, and my family knew me. So for them, other than my mother’s obvious transgression, they could hold space for both of those realities. They could think about this unknown entity around them at the same time as loving me with no irony at all.

From left, American actors Gene Wilder (1933 – 2016) and Richard Pryor (1940 – 2005), with the latter’s daughter, Rain Pryor, as they attend a premiere party for ‘Hear No Evil, See No Evil’ at the Century Plaza Hotel, Century City, California, May 7, 1989. (Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)

I also want to ask about the flip side of this, where members of the Black side of your family would tell you that the Jews killed Jesus, again to your face. But at the same time, your dad fathered two children by two different Jewish women —

And dated others! I think my father was just, honestly, an openhearted person. I don’t think those things mattered in that way to him whatsoever. 

I think my grandmother on my father’s side [who made the comment about Jews], much like my grandmother on my mother’s side, was very provincial in her own way. And I would have been kind of a novelty to her: the idea that I was Black, not biracial, because there are a lot of biracial people in the Black community, but that I was Black and Jewish. 

I’m sure she believed it. I don’t think she was teasing me. I’m sure she believed what she was saying, and I think at the time it was a little scary, and it’s funny to me now. Also, my mother would tell me all the time how Black people and Jewish people work together in the Civil Rights movement, and that was the kind of narrative I think I preferred.

More Jewish organizations these days are trying to create spaces for Jews of color. What do you make of that? Do you feel like there’s been a shift?

The way I experience it is that these young people feel like they’re allowed to talk about it. They’re allowed to talk about the racism, they’re allowed to talk about the antisemitism that they experience from all sides. I felt like people were telling me, “You need to think Black,” and then on the other side, “You need to think Jewish.” But nobody really knew how to create space for me to be the intersectionality of it. These folks that I see on TikTok are 100% intersectional.

Today, to the extent that there is any sort of meaningful discourse about racism and antisemitism, it feels like people know it’s bad to be labeled as those things. So there’s a lot of cageyness around, “Well as long as I don’t use the N-word, or as long as I don’t say I hate Jews specifically, then you can’t label me as those things.” To bring your research into it, do you feel like we’ve progressed at all?

No, no, I don’t. I think that we are in a really frightening historical moment, where rights are being stripped from people left and right, and I even think, in some ways, thinking about the progress narrative is not necessarily useful.

I don’t think the word has receded quite as much as the way you move through the world has shown you. Because the word is being used and deployed all the time against people in the very hard-r, white racist version. When I’m writing about the N-word, I’m really writing about racism. It is like you said, a proxy. It’s a stand-in for racism. I think it’s really important for us, among our friends in the classroom, dinner tables, communities, and even more broadly, to be having these really hard conversations, and I hope that by revealing my own vulnerabilities around this process, that I’ll create like a safe kind of open-hearted jumping off point for people to have these hard conversations.

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On social media, however, the incident quickly drew a slew of antisemitic comments.

“They can’t help it. Roaches and rats love the sewers,” wrote one Facebook user on a post by the Rockland Daily.

“Those tunnels were promised to them 3,000 years ago,” another user wrote, referencing the common online antisemitic phrase ridiculing the Jewish connection to Israel.

Many of the comments also referenced the 2024 incident at the Chabad-Lubavitch movement’s world headquarters in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in which a group from the movement attempted to dig an unauthorized tunnel beneath the building.

“From the tunnels in Brooklyn to the tunnels in nyack! The black coats never disappoint ,” one user wrote. “There drawn to tunnels. Natural instinct,” another wrote.

The girls, students from the Toras Emachu school in Monsey, New York, had been visiting Nyack Memorial Park on a school trip when they entered a large drainage culvert located in the park, according to the Orangetown Police Department.

While walking through the tunnel system, the students got lost but were heard by individuals in the town who alerted police, according to Nyack Mayor Joseph Rand.

“First responders immediately came to the scene and located all the girls at various points in Nyack,” Rand wrote in a post on Facebook. “Technically, none of the girls were ‘rescued,’ because they all came out in their own power, but everyone’s lucky that the authorities responded and figured out where all the girls were as quickly as they did.”

Rand said that roughly 70 students were on the trip, and there were no serious injuries beyond some “cuts and scrapes.”

Nyack Village Administrator Andy Stewart told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the school group had not been given a permit to host a field trip in the park Wednesday, and while there was “definitely concern over the violation of that law,” he wasn’t sure how the local government would follow up with the school.

“This is a group that did not have a permit, and so we didn’t know they were there, and they made no plans with the village,” Stewart said.

The Toras Emachu school did not respond to numerous requests for comment from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

But while local town officials handle the response to the incident, for some Jewish groups, the online response underscored how an innocuous incident can become a vehicle for antisemitic rhetoric.

“Unfortunately, internet comment sections have become havens for antisemitic memes and conspiracies, and commenters emboldened by relative anonymity will jump at any opportunity to demonize Jews,” Nate Wolfson, the communications director for the Nexus Project, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about the incident. “In this case, a story of dozens of children getting lost on a field trip is appallingly used to spread stereotypes about Jews, including comparing them to rats.”

Wolfson added that the references to the Chabad tunnel incident had been “especially troubling,” adding that the story had been “routinely used by antisemites to spread truly vicious and dangerous conspiracies about child sex trafficking.”

Some Nyack residents also called out the spate of antisemitic comments about the incident online.

“This was not hard to find. It was not buried. It was not one bad comment from one bad actor. It was thread after thread of people in this county saying the same old bullshit about Jewish people like it was nothing,” wrote one resident in a post on Facebook alongside a series of screenshots of antisemitic comments. “If all it takes is one local news story for your contempt to come spilling out, the contempt was already there.”

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