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The Salanter Akiba Riverdale High School and Academy marked the first anniversary of Oct. 7 by reaffirming the school’s commitment to supporting Israel.
The day began with assemblies in both the High School and Academy that heard from Riverdale Rep. Ritchie Torres. He said that peace would be possible only when Israel is safe from genocidal enemies intent on repeating Oct. 7.
•SAR Academy alumna Abby Marcus told ninth graders how she
helped collect money and army gear — financing an estimated $2.5-million in goods and filling move than 800 duffle bags — to aid IDF solidiers.
•Tenth graders heard SAR parent Rachael Klein discuss Boots for Israel. She led an effort to send more than 60,000 pairs of boots to IDF soldiers.
•Eleventh graders were moved by the stories of SAR parent Esther Sperber who’s been involved in the Hostages and Missing Families Forum.
•Seniors traveled to Manhattan to participate in a ceremony at the UN.
With courage and humility we undertake the work of teshuvah, praying that Hashem will forgive our transgressions.
When we are asked to forgive, we endeavor to emulate G-d’s attribute of mercy and to be generous in giving mechilah to those who have slighted us.
But it’s different this year. Acquaintaces — not to mention colleagues, long-time friends and even family members — too often rage against each other. Are we hesitant to ask forgiveness because we ourselves are not in a forgiving mood?
How many of us no longer chat with people whose politics we find indefensible? How may Shabbos dinner invites were not extended and how many dinners ended with host or guest feeling less than Shabbosdik?
Even if we believe our political arguments are “for the sake of Heaven” (a haughty presumption),
Commentary by Jonathan Tobin
The first anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas massacres in southern Israel adds yet another sacred date to a calendar already filled with those devoted to mourning tragedies in Jewish history. But the pain is fresh from this most recent instance of Jewish suffering.
The war against Islamist terrorists that began last Oct. 7 is ongoing with hostilities against Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon. And more than 100 of the hostages taken are still unaccounted for or continue to be held captive by Palestinian terrorists.
In Israel, much of the commentary will focus, as it has in the previous 365 days, on pinning responsibility for the massive failure on the part of Israel’s military, intelligence and political establishments that allowed the catastrophe to unfold. But the post-mortems shouldn’t be limited to how and why Hamas was able to breach the border so easily, setting in motion a day of horror that was the worst instance of mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
are we licensed to act cruelly to a fellow Jew or justified in rejecting a fellow Jew’s apology?
Our tradition emphasizes that we should seek forgiveness from others before seeking forgiveness from G-d. In Mishneh Torah (Repentence 3) we are taught:
When the person who wronged him asks forgiveness, he should forgive with a complete heart and a willing spirit. Even if he aggravated and wronged him severely, he should not seek revenge or bear a grudge.
• • • Publishing a newspaper carries the risk that someone may be hurt by something printed or something omitted. I ask mechilah of anyone I may have hurt either through this newspaper or in person, and I offer mechilah to anyone who might seek it from me. Wishing all a gemar chatimah tovah. Ed Weintrob, Editor and Publisher
Both in Israel and in the Diaspora, the discussion about what happened must also include broader misconceptions that not only helped bring about this epic disaster but that might conceivably allow it to be re-
peated in the future. That’s especially true in the United States, where public discussion of the war on Hamas continues to center on myths that should have been rejected long ago.
Rep. Ritchie Torres speaking at SAR Academy in Riverdale on Monday, Oct. 7
A public bomb shelter where Israelis were murdered at the Oct. 7 massacre, on a road near the Israeli-Gaza border in southern Israel. Chaim Goldberg, Flash90
Marking 10/7 in White House and at rebbe’s ohel
President Biden
President Joe Biden commemorated the first anniversary of Hamas’ invasion by lighting a yahrzeit candle for those slain by the terrorists.
Biden was joined by first lady Jill Biden and Rabbi Aaron Alexander of Washington’s Adas Israel Congregation, who recited the El Maleh Rahamim prayer.
“Today marks one year of mourning for the more than 1,200 innocent people … massacred in southern Israel by the terrorist group Hamas,” the president said. He emphasized the importance of remembering not just the brutality of the attacks, but also “the beauty of the lives that were stolen that day.”
Biden said Israel had US backing in its efforts to face down Hamas and attacks from other Iranbacked groups that have proliferated over the last year.
“We support Israel’s right to defend itself against attacks from Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and Iran,” he said. “Last week, at my direction, the United States military once again actively assisted in the successful defense of Israel, helping to defeat an Iranian ballistic missile attack.”
Earlier on Monday, Biden spoke with Israeli President Isaac Herzog, expressing condolences and reaffirming the United States’ commitment to securing the safe return of all remaining hostages.
Vice-President Kamala Harris, meanwhile,
See Biden on page 26
Donald Trump
On the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 terror attacks, former President Donald Trump visited the Ohel in Springfield Gardens, Queens, resting place of the Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Schneerson.
Trump placed a few coins into a large tzedakah box near the entrance in keeping with Jewish tradition to increase charitable giving at this time of year.
The rebbe’s Ohel is the most visited Jewish holy site in North America, according to Chabad.org, drawing people from all walks of life. Rabbi Schneerson expended thousands of
hours meeting and corresponding with people from all walks of life, Jews and non-Jews, including presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. He was niftar in 1994.
Trump’s visit continued a family tradition: Before the presidential elections in 2016 and 2020, his daughter, Ivanka Trump, and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, paid late-night media-free visits to the Ohel, in the Old Montefiore Cemetery.
Trump was accompanied by Yael, Adi and Roy Alexander, parents and brother of Edan Alexander, who is currently being held hostage by terrorists in the Gaza Strip; Jerry Wartski, a survivor of the Auschwitz death camp; and two Jewish college students facing antisemitism on campus.
Saving Lives Five Towns Coalition
See Trump on page 26
President Biden lights a yahrtzeit candle in the White House on Oct. 7, flanked by first lady Jill Biden and Rabbi Aaron Alexander of Washington’s Adas Israel Congregation. White House
Former President Donald Trump reads a prayer at the Ohel at Old Montifiore Cemetery in Springfield Gardens, resting place of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Schneerson. Shabbos Kestenbaum, Chabad.org
Oct. 7: What really happened, then and now
Daniel GreenfielD
On Oct. 7, 2023, thousands of Hamas terrorists invaded Israel. Their mission was to wipe out the Jewish population in the nearby towns, secure them and use them as forward operating bases for the next phase of the war.
While the atrocities they committed in that initial assault — entire families burned alive in their homes, women raped and kidnapped and babies killed — made it look like a terrorist attack on a large scale, Oct. 7 had not been meant as a hit-and-run operation.
Hamas had risked too much and put too many men in the field for it to be anything other than an invasion. Its plans to continue advancing into Israel appear unrealistic only out of context.
The thousands of terrorists from Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah had been meant as the tip of a larger spear. Thousands of Hezbollah and allied terrorists had been in position on Oct. 7. Had Hamas been able to hang on to Israeli territory in the south, they would have invaded the Galilee from Lebanon, but after the initial shock and long delays throughout that first day, the Israeli military regrouped.
The Hezbollah invasion was postponed until it was briefly revived by the Islamic terror group around the time of the Sept. 17, 2024, pager attacks and then shut down by targeted Israeli strikes.
Oct. 7 had been Hezbollah’s plan before it was executed by Hamas. Hezbollah had even spent years boasting about using its network of tunnels to invade and conquer the Galilee, but the funding and plans had come out of Tehran. Yet when push came to shove, Hezbollah hesitated.
Iran had planned for an Oct. 7 that would have dealt a catastrophic blow to Israel. The original plot would have seen coordinated Hamas and Hezbollah invasions backed by heavy rocket campaigns not only by Hezbollah, but by the Houthis in Yemen and Iran’s militias in Iraq, targeting Israeli bases, military assets and infrastructure. Terror groups in Judea and Samaria would have launched their own assaults, creating a multifront guerrilla war deep inside Israel. Even if Israel had beaten back the attacks, many more Jewish communities would have been in ashes.
And seeing Israel’s weakness, hostile Muslim major military forces from Egypt and Turkey might well have joined in, leading to a conflict more on the scale of another Yom Kippur War.
The death toll would not have been 1,200 but in the tens of thousands at the very least, and perhaps, unimaginably, even more than that, on the scale of another Holocaust.
Iran had planned to break Israel on the final day of the High Holidays. And to also break the United States with it by taking out a key American coalition partner in the region.
The Biden-Harris administration had overseen the two treacherous deals with Hamas and Hezbollah. The October 2022 Israeli-Lebanese maritime deal had turned over parts of Israel’s gas field to Hezbollah’s puppet regime in Beirut, and an “understanding” had moved Qatari money to Hamas.
Both deals had been meant to assure quiet with Israel. And for a little bit, they seemed to work.
The Biden-Harris administration’s diplomacy, however, had been subverted by Iranian and other enemy agents. The deals did not assure an end to the fighting, but a planned campaign against Israel timed ahead of Iran’s nuclear breakout and the upcoming US presidential election.
The Iranian campaign, however, fell apart early due to bloodlust, scheming and cowardice.
The Iranian plan to take out Israel’s defenses and communications worked. The Israeli army and air force wasted precious hours figuring out what was going on and how to respond.
But Hamas had drugged its terrorists with Hezbollah’s captagon amphetamines. Whether it was the drug or their religion, the terrorists spent too much time glorying in their brutality, including the attack on the Nova festival, to execute the next part of their mission and secure a foothold.
After some initial battles against outnumbered Israeli forces, the tide turned once the Israelis finally understood the scale of the attack. And Hamas was demolished.
The original plan to link up with elements in Judea and Samaria was sidelined for the Hamas goal of displacing the Palestinian Authority, and so it did not risk coordinating with anyone there. By the time anyone in the area had a sense of what was going on, Hamas had already lost.
Iran had made sure that Hezbollah was ready and waiting on Lebanon’s border with Israel, but the Islamic terror group had already spent years taking a beating for Tehran in the Syrian Civil War. Hassan Nasrallah and the Hezbollah leadership had secured control over Lebanon and did not want to risk it in an operation that would devastate the terror group if Hamas could not deliver on Oct 7.
When Hamas failed to hold up its end, Hezbollah did not invade, but began a running war with Israel as prep for a potential invasion. Israel targeted Hezbollah positions while the Islamic terror group depopulated parts of northern Israel. Hezbollah was giving its Iranian bosses some of what they wanted without actually committing to a full scale war with the Jewish state.
The Biden-Harris administration’s ceasefire agenda and rallies inside Israel for a hostage deal at any cost kept the Hezbollah cam-
paign alive by transforming an invasion prep campaign into a pressure campaign to spare Hamas. Hezbollah would have likely stepped down once it was clear that Hamas had lost, if talk of a deal had not provided a lifeline to the terror group.
Hezbollah miscalculated that Israel was too weakened by Oct. 7 and its engagement in Gaza to respond. It gloated over worried headlines in the Israeli media about its massive stockpile of rockets. Nasrallah and the Hezbollah leadership became convinced Israel was terrified of them.
But as Israel’s large-scale confrontations with Hamas wound down and Hezbollah’s attacks escalated, the war shifted over to Lebanon. In the year of fighting, Hamas had become too small to present a useful target for largescale military operations. The Israeli campaign in Gaza had fractured the Hamas terrorist operations back down to the cell structure where terrorist groups first begin. Hezbollah however was just the right size to take on. And it was thoroughly bugged.
Israel’s campaign struck shattering blows to the morale of Iran’s Islamic terror coalition. Iran’s ballistic missile attacks on Israel were not a sign of strength, but of weakness. Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran’s local proxies, had become too weakened to do the job. The Houthis and Iraqi militias can contribute something to the attacks on Israel, but not nearly enough. What initially looked like a solid projection of force by an Iranian Shi’ite coalition is falling apart into chaos.
But the collapse really began on Oct. 7 when Hamas faltered and Hezbollah did not invade. Hamas proved unable to control its urge to kill Jews long enough to secure military objectives. Hezbollah was unwilling to put everything on the line for Hamas. Iran was happy to see Hamas and Hezbollah bleed, but unwilling to take any major risks until they had delivered real results. Iran had exploited Hamas and Hezbollah, and Hezbollah had sold out Hamas on Oct 7.
And the result was that what was meant to be another Holocaust failed.
Many Israelis suffered unimaginably on Oct 7. Mothers were killed in front of children. Pregnant women were butchered. Families were burned alive in their homes. But Israel is still here.
And it’s winning.
It’s winning despite European arms embargoes and threats from the Biden-Harris administration. It’s winning because Israel knows there is no alternative to victory.
Oct. 7 shattered the complacency some Israelis had developed about their situation. The months since have made it clear that no amount of deals are a substitute for security. Threats as a deterrent cease to provide any leverage when the enemy stops fearing they will be carried out.
A year later, Israel is battered, but Israelis can envision a future in which they will not have to live in bomb shelters or appease terrorists in the hopes of being allowed to go on with their lives.
Last year, Israelis thought that life would mostly go on the way it had. Now they know it cannot.
Dec. 7, 1941. 9/11. Oct. 7. These are not just dates, they are wake-up calls. A year later after a long day of terror and death on what was to be a joyous holiday, Israel is awake.
The original plot would have seen coordinated Hamas and Hezbollah invasions backed by heavy rocket campaigns.
Israeli soldiers during operational activity in the Gaza Strip, August 2024. IDF
Oldest Hebrew book is on display in Washington
By Menachem Wecker, JNS
If Herschel Hepler, associate curator of Hebrew manuscripts at Museum of the Bible, hadn’t been searching Google Images in April 2016, he probably would not have found an image of a Hebrew manuscript in the museum’s collection which was in Afghanistan at a time when it was supposed to be in Egypt.
If not for that revelation — which raised enduring questions about international law, diplomacy and ethics — the private museum in Washington likely wouldn’t have conducted tests on the Afghan Liturgical Quire and learned that it is not only older than previously thought but the oldest known Hebrew book.
The discovery, and Hepler’s communication with the photographer who documented the book when it was in the possession of an Afghan ruler, led the museum to enlist the scholar Malachi Beit-Arié as research lead on the project. BeitArié pushed the museum to conduct dating tests in 2019 of four parts of the manuscript, which indicated that the book is eighth rather than ninth century. (Beit-Arié died at 86 last October.)
“If we hadn’t expanded the project around Malachi, I doubt any other scholar would have the confidence to argue for us to do four radiometric dating tests,” Hepler told JNS. “The logical progression of this seems obvious now, but it didn’t occur to me.”
Such tests degrade small portions of the parchment. “There are a lot of manuscripts and codices that have a date range and radiometric dating, and they took one sample from one page, and they say, ‘Well. Here’s the date range’,” Hepler said. (A codex is a bound book, a manuscript is a hand-written text and a quire refers to 24 same-sized sheets of paper.)
“We took four samples across the structure of the manuscript, including what we know is the last thing added,” Hepler explained. Tests revealed that even the newest part of the book had the highest probability of being before the year 780, during which there was a large “solar event” that presented “a hard line on the carbon in the atmosphere.”
At a reception at the Museum of the Bible last week, which drew officials from the US State Department, former Afghan officials, Afghan Jews who live in the United States and Washington Jewish leaders, the notion that the oldest Hebrew book had endured and found its way to Washington was frequently cited as a “miracle.” The book is on view through Jan. 12 in the exhibit “Sacred Words: Revealing the Earliest Hebrew Book.”
Hepler is certain that the manuscript is the oldest known Hebrew book, but mysteries abound about the object and its makers.
Several people appear to have been involved in its creation, all educated people with the exception of someone who was practicing her or his aleph bet on part of a page, according to Hepler. Inexplicably, a portion of the Passover haggadah is upside-down; texts, including liturgy for Sukkot and for Shabbat, are truncated; spelling is inconsistent, and the manuscript contains Hebrew, Aramaic and Judeo-Persian.
“I think there were two quires that had independent lives from this manuscript in the eighth century,” Hepler said. “Someone came into possession of these two different quires and wanted to combine them.” [A quire are four sheets of paper or parchment folded to form eight leaves, as in medieval manuscripts.] That compiler “had all of his liturgy in one
The curator of Jewish art at the JTS library called this ‘the most exciting find that has appeared in a millennium.’
booklet, for some reason, but he didn’t know how to combine quires, so he stacked them instead of sewing them next to each other,” Hepler told JNS.
The square manuscript, about four and threequarter inches on each side, also has erasures, including where the author of the poem ran out of room and removed two lines of text from the haggadah, which extended onto a new page (or folio).
“I think that’s why it’s upside down, because the haggadah is first. The blank sides of the bifolios were wanted in a specific location in order to write 19 pages worth of Sabbath morning prayers,” Hepler said. He noted that the haggadah is incomplete and the poem barely doesn’t finish.
“Based on where everyone is stopping, usually in the middle of a folio, there is no folio missing,” he said. “I think this is a personal book of prayers, potentially someone traveling along certain routes. A merchant. Someone very educated. All of the scripts are very experienced hands.”
Sharon Liberman Mintz, curator of Jewish art at the Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary, called this “the most exciting find that has appeared in a millennium.”
as the impetus for the Jews to say this is OK.”
The Afghan Liturgical Quire, he said, “really pushes the history of the Jewish book qua book back approximately 200 years.”
He compared a pocket-sized book like the quire to a small paperback one would take to the beach today, suggesting that “this almost undoubtedly would have been from some traveler, who needed the prayers that he quasi-knew by memory but still needed a guide for.”
Rendsburg noted that a prayer in the book, for Shabbat, comes from Psalm 92. “It only quotes the first two or three verses, and then it says, ‘and the rest until the end’,” he said. “So it got you started.”
Variations in spelling in the manuscript are to be expected, according to Rendsburg.
“Every manuscript is sui generis. You don’t get a fixed text until the age of printing, so you have this siddur with this wording and another siddur even in the same community with a different wording,” he said.
When Steve Green, the president of Hobby Lobby, presented the book in 2013 at a Religion Newswriters Association con-
“It is the first bound, Hebrew book. It’s the first codex that we have,” Liberman Mintz said at the Sunday reception. “We have Hebrew books in scroll format from the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls, from the first century before the Common Era going until the second century of the Common Era.”
Then, prior to this manuscript, there were seven centuries of a “quiet” period until biblical codices started appearing in the 900s.
“We knew of nothing, although we did know from secondary sources in the Geonic period that there were such things as bound codices,” Liberman Mintz told JNS. “This is the first material evidence of the Hebrew book.”
Several manuscripts from the JTS collection are part of the exhibition at the Museum of the Bible to contextualize the Afghan Liturgical Quire, and the exhibition will travel to JTS in New York after its run in Washington. The Dutch publisher Brill plans to publish a scholarly tome on the research underpinning the show in April.
Gary Rendsburg, distinguished professor of Jewish studies and chair in Jewish history at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, told JNS that Jews kept using scrolls, much like they do in synagogues today, for centuries but they resisted the book, which was associated with Christianity, until Muslims adopted the technology.
“At some point, they had to turn to the codex, which is the forerunner of the modern book, and their Christian and Muslim neighbors had the codex, but the Jews resisted,” he said. “We didn’t know when they created the codex. At what point did they say, ‘This is really a wonderful idea?’”
Unlike with a scroll, one can flip pages quickly in a codex, and a book takes half the parchment, since one can write on both sides.
“Jews resisted because of the Christians,” Rendsburg told JNS. “Once the Muslims started the codex at the very beginning, that served
collapsed ceiling in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, in 1997. (Hazaras are a persecuted minority in Afghanistan.)
The man gave the object to the local Afghan leader, Karim Khalili, who recognized it as sacred and covered it with a cloth and placed it in a special box. It is not clear under what circumstances the book was then put up for sale, and who with connections to the ruler — or the ruler himself — actually sold it.
“One of Rahbar Khalili’s deputies apparently attempted to sell the ALQ between 1998 and 2001,” the Museum of the Bible website states, adding that it was “bought (apparently) by an unnamed private collector in London in summer 2001, who held it in London for a decade or more.” Hobby Lobby bought it from “an Israeli dealer” in July 2013.
“Curators confirmed multiple attempted sales of the ALQ in the United States and Europe between March 1998 and July 2001 before one of Khalili’s deputies apparently sold the ALQ to a private collector in London around Aug./Sept. 2001,” it adds. “Despite several leads, the name of this private collector has yet to be confirmed.”
The manuscript “remains accessible in Washington, because of the kindness of Afghanistan officials (from the pre-Taliban government), who followed a human rights-based approach to cultural heritage with the Museum of the Bible to ensure displaced Afghan Jews can continue to safely access and enjoy the oldest Hebrew book in the world,” per a brochure about the quire that the museum published.
“Especially in today’s world, where you are dealing with what restorative justice looks like — I think it’s a little too narrow right now,” Hepler told JNS. “The main problem is some of the field has not integrated human rights-based thinking into their cultural heritage thought. So there’s a little too much nationalism going on with cultural heritage thought. The only system of restorative justice is this one lever-mechanism of ‘We got to return it to the source country.’”
Hepler added that the Museum of the Bible “has a heightened concern for religious communities and their rights associated with their sacred texts.”
ference, the founder of the museum and its board chair said that the manuscript dated to the ninth century.
In November 2017, when the museum opened in Washington, it exhibited the closed book alongside an open facsimile of the object. It stated that the book is a “small ‘siddur,’ a Jewish prayer book written about AD 840.” A label added that the object, which came from the “Middle East,” is “the oldest known siddur or Jewish prayer book known to survive. The manuscript’s complex structure presents many mysteries for scholars.”
“The siddur was thought to be part of private collections in England since the 1950s. However, Museum of the Bible curators recently discovered a photograph that shows that it was in Afghanistan in 1997,” the label stated. “This raises clear concern about the manuscript’s ownership history.”
Hepler said that Hobby Lobby acquired the quire in July 2013 — half a year after he started at the museum — and the manuscript went on view for a short time in Israel in 2014. In 2015, Green donated the book to the museum.
The quire was on view from when the museum opened in November 2017, until the museum’s research team met in May 2018 to discuss it.
In 2016, Hepler was “was practicing paleography things which I learned from Malachi’s codicology course a few months earlier.” He was researching every manuscript in the museum’s collection without a colophon — an autograph statement in which the author or authors of a manuscript self-identify.
“I recognized it immediately,” he said of the image he found. He felt “a lot of things,” he told JNS. “Definitely shock and angst.” The title of the article in Tablet that contained the image, he said, was “War Papers.”
It turned out that the manuscript, which had been believed to be in the genizah of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, was actually an object that a Hazara man found in a cave below a
He told JNS that the Taliban has not requested the book back, and Afghan Jews, largely in New York, have supported the museum in its decision to retain and exhibit the book and in “creating this partnership that prioritizes access for the religious community connected to this sacred book.”
Speaking at the opening reception, Carlos Campo, CEO of Museum of the Bible, said that a “simple, small artifact” was bringing people together in peace.
Adela Raz, the last Afghan ambassador to the United States, told the audience that the show represents “a celebration of diversity, coexistence and rich history and beauty that defines Afghan history and its heritage.”
The object and the show send a “powerful message” of “resilience, unity and the enduring spirit of Afghanistan,” Raz said. “Today’s exhibition serves as a powerful reminder of what Afghanistan once was — an integral part of the Silk Road, a crossroad of trade routes and a beacon of great civilization.”
“Afghanistan once was a place where people from across the corners of the world not only passed through, but chose to stay, contributing to the vibrant and diverse culture that made our country so unique,” she said. “For centuries, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims lived side-by-side in harmony, enriching our collective cultural heritage.”
Jason Guberman, executive director of the American Sephardi Federation, told attendees that “Jewish history is so much about travels, but particularly for the Sephardic world.
“Sephardim were the ones who were breaking the borders and the barriers. They were the philosophers, the poets, the scholars, the scientists, the singers,” he said. “They were the ones who really invigorated the Silk Road and helped give us the cosmopolitan world.”
Rendsburg said that the first material evidence of the Hebrew book could give way to other such discoveries. “The hope would be, yes, we would always find more,” he said.
The Afghan Liturgical Quire, dated to the eight century, on view through Jan. 12 in the exhibit “Sacred Words: Revealing the Earliest Hebrew Book” at the Museum of the Bible in Washington. Menachem Wecker
Re-Elect Eric
New York ate
• FIXING the “Cashless Bail” Laws
• SUPPORTING the Police
• ENDING anti-Semitism and Hate Crimes
• SAYING “NO” to a “Sanctuary County” in Nassau
• STOPPING the Commuter Tax (Congestion Pricing) Permanently
“Rep. Tom Suozzi has been a champion of the U.S.-Israel relationship.”
– 2024 AIPAC Endorsement
Iran must be stopped now. Now is the time to degrade Iran’s nefarious network of terror once and for all. Israel’s willingness to respond to Iran’s attack must be embraced and supported by the United States and all freedom-loving countries.
Suozzi’s support for Israel has been admirably strong and consistent, evidence of a deep personal commitment to the Jewish State... it is extremely important to bolster the pro-Israel, centrist majority among House Democrats. Having Tom Suozzi on Israel’s side in the halls of Congress will help offset the increasing influence of extreme left-wing progressives who are hostile to Israel and its interests. At the same time, we know that he will support all efforts to fight the growing antisemitism in this country.
01/24/2024
What’s it all about? This ethical and just war is not about territory. It’s about Zion, our soul
alyza lewin Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law
From a keynote address delivered on Sept. 26 at the 18th Annual Jewish Law Symposium in Whippany, NJ.
Israel is fighting a moral, ethical and just war. It is a war that Israel and the Jewish people did not want, did not seek and did not start. Similar to the battle undertaken by the Maccabees more than 2,000 years ago, Israel today is waging a war against those who seek to destroy our identity as Jews.
This is not a war over territory. … For Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and the sponsor of each of these terror organizations — the Iranian revolutionary regime — this is not a political dispute that can be resolved through land swaps or a two-state solution. Their goal, as spelled out in the Houthi slogan, is, “God is the Greatest. Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam.”
Iran and its terror proxies seek to eradicate Israel, the Jewish people and America.
It’s difficult to accept that there are people in this world consumed by irrational hate — and that it is not possible to eradicate that hate through negotiated political treaties. … At its core, antisemitism is a continuously shifting baseless conspiracy theory that holds Jews responsible for society’s perceived misfortunes. No matter what the century, no matter the era, the Jews are always the scapegoat.
As Douglas Murray said recently: “The Jews can never win. They’ve been hated for being rich and for being poor … for integrating and for not integrating … for being stateless … rootless cosmopolitans … [and now] for having a state.”
For the Nazis, who sought a pure Aryan race, the Jews were the ultimate race polluters. The Nazis certainly did not view the Jews as “white.” And yet, today, when many people see the world through the binary lens of the “oppressed” and “oppressors,” there are those who say that all Jews, including Jews of color, are white, colonizing oppressors.
Jewish history is inextricably intertwined with the Land of Israel. Those who recognize this are Zionists.
Jews are fighting both a military war on the ground in the Middle East and a war of words and ideas around the globe. The current military battle began with Hamas’s barbaric, unprovoked attack on Oct. 7, but the battle of ideas — that seeks to demonize Jewish identity and deny Jewish history — that battle has been waging on college campuses and beyond for decades.
For years, Jewish students have been vilified and equated with evil. Einat Wilf, a former member of the Israeli Knesset, calls it the “placard strategy.” Imagine the sign, with its simple message: Star of David = Zionist = evil concept (apartheid, ethnic cleansing, colonialism, famine, genocide, etc). These concepts are not presented to discuss or even debate their accuracy. Is it apartheid? Or a genocide? No, the evil concepts are there for the equation, the idea is to equate Jews (as represented by the Star of David) and the “Zionists” with evil.
As president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, I have been speak-
ing with students on campus on a nearly daily basis for years. And I can tell you that what is taking place at universities today, overwhelmingly, is not a good-faith political debate about Israel’s policies.
When students are barred from the encampments, no one inquires to determine whether or not they support Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or a two-state solution before blocking their access to the university library or the dining hall. Instead, anti-Israel demonstrators see a student wearing a Magen David or a kippah or speaking Hebrew, and they conclude that the student must be a “Zionist” — a Jew who defines their identity as part of a people indigenous to the land of Israel.
On college campuses today, if you believe the Jews are a people with a right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland and that, therefore, Israel has a right to exist, you are branded a Zionist and told you are not welcome. You are treated as a pariah and the equivalent of evil.
Title VI of the US Civil Rights Act requires universities that receive federal funds (which includes nearly all institutions of higher education in the US) to protect students from harassment and discrimination that is so severe it denies the student an equal educational opportunity.
Although Title VI does not include “religion” as a protected category, for the last 20 years, the statute has been interpreted by the US Department of Education to cover Jews and members of other faith-based communities when they are targeted on the basis of their actual or perceived shared ancestry and ethnicity rather than their religious practice. In other words, universities have a legal obligation to protect Jewish students when they are being bullied, shunned, marginalized, excluded or assaulted on the basis of their Jewish shared ancestry and ethnicity. If universities fail to meet their obligation, they risk losing their federal funding.
So what is the Jews’ shared ancestry and ethnicity?
Well, Jews are not only a faith, we are also a people. And what defines our peoplehood, what has kept us connected over millennia, is our shared ancestral history and heritage. What binds us together as Jews is our collective memory. We share the stories of our ancestors.
At the Passover seder, for example, we tell the
But the war we are fighting against those who deny Jewish identity and erase Jewish history is increasing in intensity. There is a narrative that is becoming entrenched in kindergarten to 12th-grade lesson plans and is being promoted on university campuses as scholarship.
According to this narrative, everything that happened in the land that we call Israel, since creation, is Palestinian. It acknowledges that there were Jews, Christians and Muslims living in the land. But it defines those identities as only religious identities. According to this narrative, the ethnic and cultural identity of all those people throughout history was Palestinian.
Those who promote this narrative claim to “know the difference” between “Jews” and “Zionists.” For them, “Jews” define Judaism as only a religion. The “Zionists” by contrast, are the ones they accuse of trying to “Judaize” Palestinian history and heritage by calling it Jewish. According to this narrative, Jewish identity is completely erased and hijacked. Jewish history is renamed as Palestinian and Jewish peoplehood is denied. That, however, is still not the end of the road. Those who seek to eradicate our Jewish identity have developed a term, they call it Anti-Palestinian Racism. According to the definition, the term applies to anyone who pushes back against the narrative I just described. So Jews who define themselves as members of a people indigenous to the Land of Israel or as Zionists are being accused of anti-Palestinian racism.
story of how our ancestors were liberated from slavery in Egypt. During Sukkot, we recall how our people wandered in the desert on the way to the Promised Land.
Our Jewish history is inextricably intertwined with the Land of Israel. It is impossible to separate the two.
Some 3,000 years ago, King David designated Jerusalem, also known as Zion, as the capital of Israel. His son, King Solomon, built the Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Our holidays are linked to the agricultural cycle in Israel. For centuries, Jews have not only prayed facing Jerusalem, but they have also prayed to return there.
Those who recognize this history and understand that the Jews are a people indigenous to the land of Israel are Zionists. They appreciate that, as an indigenous people, Jews have a right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland.
I do not mean to suggest that all Jews are Zionists.
•Some Jews do not define their identity this way. By the same token, not all Jews are Sabbath observers. But the fact that some Jews do not observe Shabbat does not negate the fact that Shabbat observance is, for Jews who observe Shabbat, an integral part of what it means to them to be Jewish.
•So too, the fact that some Jews may claim to be “anti-Zionist” does not negate the fact that for the overwhelming majority of Jews, Zionism — the recognition that the Jews are a people indigenous to the land of Israel — is an integral component of how they define their Jewish identity. That is why, according to a Pew study, eight in 10 Jews say caring about Israel is an essential or important part of what being Jewish means to them.
Universities, thankfully, are beginning to understand this truth. Some schools like New York University, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign and Columbia University, and the recommendation report prepared by Judge Jonathan Lippman for the City University of New York (CUNY) system, have recently explicitly acknowledged that for many Jews, Zionism is a part of Jewish identity, and therefore, harassment and discrimination of “Zionists” violates university policy when the term is being used as a substitute for “Jew.”
Merely expressing pride in our Jewish ancestral heritage is now being defined as somehow erasing Palestinian history. This is the modern incarnation of the United Nation’s repugnant “Zionism is Racism” resolution which was revoked in 1991. And it is at the core of the war of words and ideas being waged on university campuses.
Social media has brought the military battlefield into our living rooms and onto the palm of our hand. In this way, the military battlefield has become a tool in the war of words and ideas.
Our enemies frequently mischaracterize what takes place on the military battlefield, and weaponize it to dehumanize Israelis and Jews. We need to recognize this mischaracterization and manipulation and the threat that it poses to the Jewish people worldwide.
It’s incumbent upon us to push back forcefully against any narrative that dehumanizes Jews and seeks to erase and deny our Jewish identity, history and heritage and eradicate our homeland. Fighting these battles is moral, just and ethical. Just like the battle the Maccabees waged to preserve Jewish identity so many years ago.
I end on a note of hope. The silver lining evident today on campuses and beyond is that Jewish engagement in Hillel and Chabad is skyrocketing. On campus, Hillel directors and Chabad rabbis report that record numbers of students are participating in their programs. It is wonderful that Jews across the country are leaning in and learning more about their Jewish identity. Increased knowledge enables confident warriors. Never forget that the best antidote to bigotry and discrimination is self-confidence and pride.
Jews are the most resilient people in history.
As the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks said, “Jews are the people who not only survive but thrive in adversity.” We have an uncanny ability to find inner strength in our darkest moments.
To quote Rabbi Sacks again, “Any civilization that can see the blessing within the curse, the fragment of light within the heart of darkness, has within it the capacity to endure.” We will endure, and we will thrive.
So, my prayer for the coming year is that we be blessed as a people to come through this difficult time a more united, better-educated, more empathetic, stronger, proud people who will continue to enrich and enhance our world, and serve as a light unto the nations.
Am Yisrael Chai. Shanah Tovah!
WINE AND DINE
Breaking the fast with table of light delights
For years we hosted a big break fast with lots of friends. I would cook for days and put out a spread for all my starving guests enhanced by all the delicious foods my friends made. The babies would sleep in Pack ‘n Nlays, toddlers would fall asleep anywhere and older kids loved staying up and watching Disney movies in the den.
We would eat and talk and … eat until after nine and sometimes later if the holiday feel on a weekend night.
We were young and thought little about eating a lot late at night. But all that eating often resulted in my feeling awful that night and even the next day. In fact, friends often said things like, “I ate way too much last night, but it was so good!” I appreciated the compliments, but I also did not want to make my friends and family ill. I thought of things to change, but it didn’t seem right — No bagels? No kugel? No dessert (often cheesecake)? No Rugelach or honey cake? What could I possible leave out?
As the years went by, the break fasts became more family focused; the kids had to get up for school the next day and often had homework or, as they got even older, they wanted to be with their closest friends or go out with friends for pizza. For a few years, we attended our synagogue’s break fast to save time and clean-up, but that, too became stressful.
I spoke with my best friend who holds a PhD in nutrition, and learned what my stomach had told me for years. Fasting and then eating a huge meal is not healthy. In fact, it is actually quite unhealthy. Since many of the foods are high in sugar and carbs, it causes blood sugar to spike and then plummet, causing headaches and other discomforts. The heaviness of some of the foods like kugel and bagels stress the sleeping digestive system to the max and can cause all kinds of tummy trouble.
In truth, the best meal following a fast would be far less appetizing than the gourmet delica-
cies we are used to, but these foods are better for us nutritionally. Light vegetable soups, fresh fruits and yogurt, maybe a slice of whole grain toast are the best foods to eat after a fast. We do not need to make up for “missed calories,” so we do not need heavy rich foods.
Can we redirect here? Can we cut back on the huge feasts that are still often the case? Up to you, but the best advice is that eating a huge meal after a fast is not wise.
The break fast meal should be gentle on our stomachs to ease our systems back into eating without stressing them. The portions should be small so that we can get to sleep comfortably. Yes, we are hungry, but it is surprising how little food will soothe that hunger.
Think about (and carefully plan) your food for before and after Yom Kippur; that way, you won’t think about it during Yom Kippur!
I wish you all an easy fast.
Cream of Cauliflower Soup (Dairy or Pareve)
I do not add any dairy to this, so it is a delicious, light, pareve soup. Can be made two days before.
• 4 Tbsp. olive oil
• 2 large or 3 medium onions, chopped finely
• 4 to 6 cloves garlic, chopped (I love Elephant Garlic for this, 1 to 2 giant cloves)
• 1 large head cauliflower, cut into florets
• 4 to 8 cups vegetable stock or water
• OPTIONAL: 1/4 to 1 cup whole or 2% milk to taste
• Salt and White pepper, to taste
• Vegetable Bouillon or Onion Soup powder, about 1 to 2 tsp.
GARNISH: Minced fresh chives or scallions
OPTIONAL GARNISH: sour cream or plain yogurt to taste
Heat a medium (5-quart) soup pot or Dutch oven. Add the oil and sauté the onions and garlic over medium heat until lightly golden, 5 to 10 minutes. Cut the cauliflower into small pieces, add them to the onions and slowly add the stock or water, just to cover the vegetables by about 1 inch only. Add the vegetable bouillon or onion soup powder. Bring to a boil, reduce
heat to simmer, cover, and cook for 35 to 45 minutes, until vegetables are very soft. Remove from heat and puree, using an immersion blender, until smooth and creamy. IF too thick, add some water or more vegetable stock. Add the spices to taste. If you like, add just enough milk to make a creamy soup. Soup should be smooth, but thick. Garnish each bowl with chopped chives, scallions, a dollop of sour cream for dairy, and, maybe, some croutons. Serves 6 to 10.
Quick and Easy Bean Spread (Pareve)
This is delicious and easy, healthful and delicious with veggie sticks, crackers or pita. Can be made 2 to 3 days ahead.
• 2 heads of garlic, tops cut off
• 2 tsp. canola oil
• 1 can (15 oz.) garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed
• 1 can (15 oz.) white beans such as Great Northern or Cannellini, drained and rinsed
• 1/3 to 1/2 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
• 2 tsp. cumin
• 3 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
• 1/4 cup fresh basil leaves or minced chives or scallions
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line a rimmed baking sheet with foil. Drizzle the cut cloves with the canola oil and wrap the heads in separate pieces of aluminum foil. Place on the baking pan.
Roast for 30 to 45 minutes or until fragrant and softened. (Squeeze with an oven gloved hand.) Remove from the oven and let cool. When
cool, scoop or squeeze out the cloves and place them in a small bowl or cup. Cover and set aside. Drain and rinse the cans of beans in a colander. Place them in the bowl of a food processor and add the lemon juice, half the cumin, the olive oil and as much of the roasted garlic as you like. Process until creamy. Add the herbs and process again until smooth. Taste and adjust cumin, lemon juice, oil, salt, and pepper. Serve with veggies, pita or crackers. Makes about 3 cups.
NOTE: You can toast the cumin by placing it in a dry skillet over medium heat, stirring until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Pour into a small bowl to cool.
You can also substitute paprika or smoked paprika for the cumin if you don’t like cumin.
Green and Green Veggies (dairy)
• 1/2 lb. asparagus, trimmed, cut into 2-inch pieces
• 1/2 lb. snow peas, strings removed, cut on the diagonal
• 1/2 lb. haricots verts or string beans, trimmed, cut into 1-inch pieces
• 1 bunch scallions, cut into 1-inch lengths, white part also
• 1 bunch chives, cut into 1-inch lengths
Bring a pot of water to a rolling boil. Add 1 teaspoon of salt. Add the asparagus and blanch just until bright green and crisp tender, about 2 to 3 minutes. Use a spider scoop to remove the asparagus to the bowl of ice water. Place in the serving bowl. Continue with the snow peas, haricots verts and scallions, adding each to the serving bowl.
Toss with the artichoke pesto or your favorite dressing and garnish with the chives. Can be made the day before. Serves 8 to 10.
Quick and Easy Bean Spread.
Breaking the fast with table of light delights…
Artichoke Pesto (Dairy)
I adapted this recipe from a very old book that had no cover and many pages missing. I tore out some recipes I liked and tossed the rest, so I’m sorry I have no way to credit the author. It is delicious!
• 2 Tbsp. (generous) minced garlic
• 1/2 cup fresh minced parsley
• 1/3 to 1/2 cup fresh basil leaves
• 1 can (14-1/2 oz.) water-packed artichoke hearts or bottoms, drained
• 1/2 cup pine nuts
• 1/2 cup Parmesan cheese
• 2-1/2 Tbsp. freshly squeezed lemon juice, to taste
• 2/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
• OPTIONAL, but suggested: 1/4 cup heavy whipping cream
Place the garlic parsley and basil in the bowl of a food processor and pulse until pureed. Add the artichoke hearts, pine nuts and parmesan cheese and process until pureed. Add the lemon juice and pulse once or twice. With the motor running, pour in the olive oil and then the cream (if using) through the feed tube and process until thick and creamy, 30 to 45 seconds. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Scrape into a serving bowl. Makes about 3 cups. Easily made the day before.
• OPTIONAL: 1 cup of any of the following: blueberries, chopped apples, chopped dates, diced strawberries Combine the cottage cheese, eggs, flour, baking powder and vanilla. Mix well. Add the sugar and honey and mix thoroughly. Add any optional fruit (about 1 cup and) and mix well. Place butter in a frying pan and add large spoons of the batter. Let cook through, about 2 to 3 minutes, and then flip to brown the second side, about 1 minute. Makes about 12 Cottage Cakes, as my kids called them. These can be made the day before and reheated in the oven. Place a piece of parchment on a large, rimmed baking sheet. Place the pancakes in a single layer. Add another sheet of parchment for another layer. Cover with plastic or foil and refrigerate overnight. Reheat in single layers on two rimmed baking sheets if needed, in a 325-degree oven for about 10-12 minutes. Makes about 20 pancakes
Tuna Veggie Salad Sans Mayo (Pareve)
This is light and fresh with lemon and veggies. The sweet carrot and onion play off the lemon. You can add all kinds of veggies such as peppers, artichoke hearts, olives, etc. You can add olive oil if you like.
• 1 small red onion or half a large one
• 3 carrots, peeled and cut into pieces
• 3 to 4 stalks celery
• 1 small leek or 3 to 4 scallions
• Juice of 1 lemon about 2 tsp. or to taste
• 3 cans of water-packed white meat tuna
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste.
• OPTIONAL: 1 to 2 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil, to taste
Peel the onion and carrots and cut into pieces. Place in the bowl of a food processor. Cut the celery into inch-long pieces and add to the food processor.
Trim the scallions or leek and cut into pieces. If using the leek, use only the white and light green parts. Cut in half lengthwise, wash thoroughly and cut into pieces. Add to the food processor. Process the veggies until evenly minced, but not pureed.
Pour into a large strainer over a bowl. Let drain for about 5 minutes or until the liquid stops dripping. You can push gently on the veggies. Add three cans of well to drained tuna to a large owl and mash as desired. Add the veggies and mix well. Add the lemon juice and mix well. If using, add the olive oil and mix well. Season with salt and pepper and serve with a salad and whole grain bread or crackers. Makes enough for 6 to 10. Easily made the day before.
Autumn Cranberry and Walnut Tart (Pareve)
This is a great custard-y dessert for the Break Fast. It can easily be made 2 to 3 days before and will keep beautifully
• 1 frozen pie crust, thawed, or I recipe of your favorite pie crust
• 3 extra-large eggs, slightly beaten
• 1/3 cup light brown sugar
• 1/3 cup white sugar
• 3/4 cup corn syrup or Golden Syrup
• 1/4 cup orange juice
• 1-1/2 cups coarsely, but evenly, chopped walnuts
• 1 cup coarsely chopped fresh cranberries
Pre-heat the oven to 450 degrees. Press the thawed pie crust into a 10-inch tart shell with a removable bottom. Place a round of parchment over the bottom of the crust and add some pie weights or dried beans. Bake 5 to 7 minutes or until just golden brown. Remove from oven, reduce heat to 350 and set the crust aside. When cool, remove the weights and parchment.
Break the eggs into a large bowl. Add the sugars, corn syrup and orange juice and whisk until well blended. Add the walnuts and cranberries, mix thoroughly and pour into the tart shell. Bake at 350 for about 35 to 45 minutes, or until the edges are puffed a bit and the center still seems soft. If the crust is getting too dark, cover with foil for the last 10 to 15 minutes of baking.
Remove from the oven and let cool for at least 30 minutes before cutting. Serve warm with whipped cream, vanilla ice cream or frozen yogurt or Pareve ice cream. Can be made 2 to 3 days ahead and refrigerated. Reheat at 300 degrees for about 15 minutes before serving. Serves 8 to 10.
Cheesecake Fruit Cups (Dairy)
If you absolutely must have cheesecake, these are size controlled and light with the added plus of fresh fruit. You can even make these in smaller tart cups for one bite treats. Make 1 to 2 days before.
CRUST:
• 1-1/2 cups graham cracker crumbs
• 2 Tbsp. sugar
• 1/3 to 1/2 cup butter melted
FILLING:
• 2 extra-large eggs slightly beaten
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 Tbsp. vanilla
• 1 lb. brick cream cheese or low-fat cream cheese
TOPPING:
• Fresh strawberries or raspberries
• Fresh black or blueberries
• Fresh peeled and cut peaches, nectarines or apricots
• 1/2 cup current, strawberry, or raspberry jelly
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Line two muffin tins with the cupcake papers using two papers per cup, or use reusable silicon liners.
CRUST: Melt the butter in a microwaveproof dish, 10 or 15 seconds at a time until melted. Combine the crumbs with the melted butter and mix with a fork. Press some crumbs into each cup and press down with clean fingers, a spoon, or small glass.
FILLING: Beat the cream cheese in a mixer until smooth. Add the sugar and the eggs and vanilla and blend until smooth, scraping down the sides as needed. Fill each cup 2/3 full. Bake at 375 degrees for 10 to 11 minutes. Remove from oven to cool.
Wash the strawberries and cut off the stem. Melt the jelly in a small pan on low heat just until melted. Cool for a few minutes. Place one berry on each tart. Spoon a little of the jelly over each berry and refrigerate. Follow the same directions for the other fruit. Use more currant jelly if needed. Remove the tarts from the pan before serving. Makes 12 tarts.
NOTE: You can use canned cherries, blueberries any other fruits you like!
In October 2022, Tamar Lemoine of Valley Stream felt a lump in her right breast and was diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer. She had previously put o a biopsy after a mammogram in 2021 detected a suspicious mass, so she knew that this time she would need to act fast.
Tamar was referred to Dr. Christine Hodyl, Director of Breast Health Services at Mount Sinai South Nassau, who created a comprehensive treatment plan that included chemotherapy and breast-conserving lumpectomy surgery along with the removal of several lymph nodes. Her treatment ended with a month of radiation therapy sessions. Now cancer-free, Tamar urges women to get their annual mammograms.
Mount Sinai South Nassau’s cancer program is accredited by the Commission on Cancer and the National Accreditation Program for Breast Centers, o ering patients a multidisciplinary approach to fight cancer without having to leave Long Island.
Jewish Star Torah columnists:
•Rabbi Avi Billet of Anshei Chesed, Boynton Beach, FL, mohel and Five Towns native •Rabbi David Etengoff of Magen David Yeshivah, Brooklyn
•Rabbi Binny Freedman, rosh yeshiva of Orayta, Jerusalem
Contributing writers:
•Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks zt”l,
former chief rabbi of United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth •Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, OU executive VP emeritus •Rabbi Raymond Apple, emeritus rabbi, Great Synagogue of Sydney •Rabbi Yossy Goldman, life rabbi emeritus, Sydenham Shul, Johannesburg and president of the South African Rabbinical Association.
Contact our columnists at: Publisher@TheJewishStar.com Five Towns Candlelighting: From the White Shul, Far Rockaway, NY
Yom Kippur’s Kol Nidre payers is an enigma wrapped in a mystery, perhaps the strangest text ever to capture the religious imagination.
First, it is not a prayer at all. It is not even a confession. It is a dry legal formula for the annulment of vows. It is written in Aramaic. It does not mention G-d. It is not part of the service. It does not require a synagogue. And it was disapproved of, or at least questioned, by generations of halachic authorities.
The first time we hear of Kol Nidre, in the eighth century, it is already being opposed by Rav Natronai Gaon, the first of many Sages throughout the centuries who found it problematic. In his view, one cannot annul the vows of an entire congregation this way. Even if one could, one should not, since it may lead people to treat vows lightly. Besides which, there has already been an annulment of vows ten days earlier, on the morning before Rosh Hashana. This is mentioned explicitly in the Talmud (Nedarim 23b). There is no mention of an annulment on Yom Kippur.
Rabbeinu Tam, Rashi’s grandson, was particularly insistent in arguing that the kind of annulment Kol Nidre represents cannot be retroactive. It cannot apply to vows already taken. It can only be a pre-emptive qualification of vows in the future. Accordingly, he insisted on changing its wording, so that Kol Nidre refers not to vows from last year to this, but from this year to next.
However, perhaps because of this, Kol Nidre created hostility on the part of non-Jews, who said it showed that Jews did not feel bound to honor their promises since they vitiated them on the holiest night of the year.
In vain it was repeatedly emphasized that Kol Nidre applies only to vows between us and G-d, not those between us and our fellow humans. Throughout the Middle Ages, and in some places until the eighteenth century, in lawsuits with nonJews, Jews were forced to take a special oath, More Judaica, because of this concern.
So there were communal and halachic reasons not to say Kol Nidre, yet it survived all the doubts and misgivings. It remains the quintessential ex-
G-d regretted His vow and allowed Moses to annul it. That is why Kol Nidre has the power it has.
pression of the awe and solemnity of the day. Its undiminished power defies all obvious explanations. Somehow it seems to point to something larger than itself, whether in Jewish history or the inner heartbeat of the Jewish soul.
Several historians have argued that it acquired its pathos from the phenomenon of forced conversions, whether to Christianity or Islam, that occurred in several places in the Middle Ages, most notably Spain and Portugal in the fourteenth and fifteenth century.
Jews would be offered the choice: convert or suffer persecution. Sometimes it was: convert or be expelled. At times it was even: convert or die. Some Jews did convert. They were known in Hebrew as anusim (people who acted under coercion). In Spanish they were known as conversos — or contemptuously as marranos (swine).
Many of them remained Jews in secret, and once a year on the night of Yom Kippur they would make their way in secret to the synagogue to seek release from the vows they had taken to adopt to another faith, on the compelling grounds that they had no other choice. For them, coming to the synagogue was like coming home, the root meaning of teshuvah.
There are obvious problems with this hypothesis. Firstly, Kol Nidre was in existence several centuries before the era of forced conversions. So historian Joseph S. Bloch suggested Kol Nidre may have originated in the much earlier Christian persecution of Jews in Visigoth Spain, when in 613 Sisebur issued a decree that Jews should either convert or be expelled, anticipating the Spanish expulsion of 1492. Even so, it is unlikely that conversos would have taken the risk of being discovered practicing Judaism. Had they done so during the centuries in which the Inquisition was in force they would have risked torture, trial and death. Moreover, the text of Kol Nidre makes no reference, however oblique, to conversion, return, identity, or atonement. It is simply an annulment of vows.
ISo the theories as they stand do not satisfy.
t may be that Kol Nidre has a different significance altogether, one that has its origin in a remarkable rabbinic interpretation of this week’s parsha. The connection between it and Yom Kippur is this:
Less than six weeks after the great revelation at Mount Sinai, the Israelites committed what seemed to be the unforgivable sin of making a Golden Calf. Moses prayed repeatedly for forgiveness on their behalf and eventually secured it, descending from Mount Sinai on the Tenth of Tishrei with a new set of tablets to replace those he had smashed in anger at their sin. The tenth of Tishrei subsequently became Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, in memory of that moment when the Israelites saw Moses with the new tablets and knew they had been forgiven.
Moses’ prayers, as recorded in the Torah, are daring. But the Midrash makes them more audacious still. The text introducing Moses’ prayer begins with the Hebrew words, Vayechal Moshe (Ex. 32:11).
Normally these are translated as “Moses besought, implored, entreated, pleaded, or attempted to pacify” G-d. However the same verb is used in the context of annulling or breaking a vow (Num. 30:3). On this basis the Sages advanced a truly remarkable interpretation: [Vayechal Moshe means] “Moses absolved G-d of His vow.” When the Israelites made the Golden Calf, Moses sought to persuade G-d to forgive them, but G-d said, “I have already taken an oath that Whoever sacrifices to any god other than the L-rd must be punished (Ex. 22:19). I cannot retract what I have said.” Moses replied, “L-rd of the universe, You have given me the power to annul oaths, for You taught me that one who takes an oath cannot break their word but a scholar can absolve them. I hereby absolve You of Your vow” (abridged from Exodus Rabbah 43:4).
According to the Sages the original act of Divine
forgiveness on which Yom Kippur is based came about through the annulment of a vow, when Moses annulled the vow of G-d. The Sages understood the verse, “Then the L-rd relented from the evil He had spoken of doing to His people” (Ex. 32:14) to mean that G-d expressed regret for the vow He had taken — a precondition for a vow to be annulled.
Why would G-d regret His determination to punish the people for their sin? On this, another Midrash offers an equally radical answer. The opening word of Psalm 61 is la–menatzeach. When this word appears in Psalms it usually means, “To the conductor, or choirmaster.” However the Sages interpreted it to mean, “To the Victor,” meaning G-d, and added this stunning commentary:
To the Victor who sought to be defeated, as it is said (Isaiah 57:16), “I will not accuse them forever, nor will I always be angry, for then they would faint away because of Me — the very people I have created.” Do not read it thus, but, “I will accuse in order to be defeated.” How so? Thus said the Holy One, blessed be He, “When I win, I lose, and when I lose I gain. I defeated the generation of the Flood, but did I not lose thereby, for I destroyed My own creation, as it says (Gen. 7:23), “Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out.”
The same happened with the generation of the Tower of Babel and the people of Sodom. But in the days of Moshe who defeated Me (by persuading Me to forgive the Israelites whom I had sworn to destroy), I gained for I did not destroy Israel.
G-d wants His forgiveness to override His justice, because strict justice hurts humanity, and humanity is G-d’s creation and carries His image.
That is why He regretted His vow and allowed Moses to annul it. That is why Kol Nidre has the power it has. For it recalls the Israelites’ worst sin, the Golden Calf, and their forgiveness, completed when Moses descended the mountain with the new tablets on the 10th of Tishrei, the anniversary of which is Yom Kippur. The forgiveness was the result of Moses’ daring prayer, understood by the Sages as an act of annulment of vows. Hence Kol Nidre, a formula for the annulment of vows.
The power of Kol Nidre has less to do with forced conversions than with a recollection of the moment, described in our parsha, when Moses stood in prayer before G-d and achieved forgiveness for the people: the first time the whole people was forgiven despite the gravity of their sin.
During Musaf on Yom Kippur we describe in detail the second Yom Kippur: the service of the High Priest, Aharon, as described in Vayikra 16. But on Kol Nidre we recall the first Yom Kippur when Moses annulled the Almighty’s vow, letting His compassion override His justice, the basis of all Divine forgiveness.
I believe we must always strive to fulfil our promises. If we fail to keep our word, eventually we lose our freedom. But given the choice between justice and forgiveness, choose forgiveness. When we forgive and are worthy of being forgiven, we are liberated from a past we regret, to build a better future.
If you would have collected a group of world-renowned military strategists on Yom Kippur in 1973 and asked them, at 4 pm Israel time, for a prognosis on the status of the events unfolding on the Golan Heights that afternoon, they would have probably told you Israel should be preparing the airport and shipping ports for a massive evacuation. And in all honesty, they would have been right.
A single anti-tank shell may have been the tipping point in the Yom Kippur war.
Scarcely two hours after 2,000 Syrian tanks crossed the border with only two brigades (approximately 150 tanks) on the Israeli line, nearly 50 percent of Israel’s forces had been wiped out.
In the South, all along the Sinai border, hundreds of thousands of Egyptian troops had crossed the Suez Canal and the famous Bar-Lev line was in tatters, with only three Israeli tanks trying to stem the tide. It appeared that the young State of Israel was about to become a memory.
And yet, just a few days later, the Syrian troops were in retreat, Israeli reserve divisions that were finally coming on line were rolling towards Damascus, and the entire Egyptian eighth army was on the verge of being surrounded. How did this happen? What turned things around?
Malcolm Gladwell, in his best selling book “The Tipping Point,” cites the example of Hush Puppies shoes. They were about to be phased out of production before skyrocketing, in just a few months, to become one of America’s most popular brands, suggesting that there is a “tipping point,” a series of seemingly insignificant events that combine to turn everything around and change the course of events.
See Freedman on page 26
Opening a window to new opportunities ahead
Rabbi DR. tzvi
Imagine a very important project in which you were once involved. It could have been at work, in school, or in your personal life. You gave it your all. You used all the resources at your command, involving many other people, spending quite a bit of money, and investing a lot of your own time and energy. You were confident that you had done everything possible to guarantee the success of this project.
Then, out of the blue, the whole project fell apart, collapsing beyond any hope of repair.
We have all had experiences in which an endeavor we had every reason to believe would succeed blows up in our face.
What is the typical reaction to such disappointment? The average person just gives up, thinking that it would be futile to start all over. Only a truly exceptional individual will explore the possibilities of trying again, of giving the entire undertaking a second chance.
To justify the reaction of this exceptional individual, and in the interests of making a case
for the notion of a second chance, I ask you to consider the single most important project in which Moses was involved —the tragic episode in the Torah portion of Ki Sisa (Exodus, Chapter 32).
This is surely one of the highlights of Moses’ career. He ascended Mount Sinai and was given the two stone tablets, engraved with the Ten Commandments by “the fingers of G-d.” He came down from the mountain and no doubt imagined that the people of Israel would gather ecstatically to receive this gift of G-d. Instead, he found the people dancing with abandon around the Golden Calf.
Surely, his disappointment was as great as those of us whose more mundane projects failed. He gave voice to his shattered dreams by shattering the sacred tablets.
The despair that Moses felt at that moment was dispelled by the surprising instruction he heard from the Almighty: “Carve two tablets of stone like the first, and I will inscribe upon the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, which you shattered.” (Exodus 34:1)
The Almighty was saying to Moses, “Try again.” He was enunciating the possibility of a second chance, and He was doing so for all time and eternity.
The Sages of the Talmud tell us that this sur-
prising instruction, this command to Moses to carve a second set of tablets, the sublime encouragement to give the people a second chance, occurred on the day of Yom Kippur. Moses shattered the tablets on the 17th day of Tammuz, and the second tablets were given on the 10th day of Tishrei.
This is a lesser-known aspect of the significance of Yom Kippur, but a very important one. The essence of the nature of the day is that the Almighty gives us the opportunity for a second chance.
One wonders whether the second chance, the second set of tablets, were equal to the original one. We would understandably guess that the second was inferior to the first. After all, second chances usually are second best.
How inspiring in this regard are the words of Saadia Gaon, who eloquently contended, more than 1,000 years ago, that the second tablets were superior to the first in no less than seven ways. Interestingly, Rabbi Saadia’s arguments are dismissed by the great commentator Abraham Ibn Ezra, who, in his commentary on Exodus 34:1 considers them to be as “trivial as a dream.”
But Rabbi Saadia’s arguments remain convincing to me, for one. He believes that the very fact that the second tablets were given on
Yom Kippur, a holy day, and not on the 17th of Tammuz, a weekday, itself speaks to their superiority.
Among the discrepancies between the first and second tablets, Rabbi Saadia notes one in particular that demonstrates the superiority of the latter. Careful students of both versions of the Ten Commandments will note that the word tov, good, does not appear at all upon the first set of tablets. Only in the second set, in the fifth commandment, do we have the phrase, “l’maan yitav lecha, (so that it will be good for you).”
Rabbi Saadia helps us expand our understanding of Yom Kippur. On the very anniversary of the giving of the second tablets, we learn of the availability of a second chance. But we also learn the far more important lesson that the second chance contains an element of “good” so that we can achieve far greater levels of success than we ever imagined the first time around.
Second chances are “good,” perhaps precisely because we can learn from the mistakes which characterized the first chance, correct them, and transcend them.
As we enter this holiest day of the Jewish calendar, let all of us who have experienced failure and disappointment recognize the availability of a second chance, and a better chance.
Push judgments aside, give others 2nd chance
Parsha of the Week
Rabbi avi billet
In describing the Yom Kippur service, the Torah tells us that “with this shall Aharon enter the Holy, with a bull that is ben bakar as a sin offering, and a ram as a burnt offering.”
Elsewhere the term ben bakar (literally, “child of cattle”) is used to distinguish the age of an animal. For example an eigel (calf) is less than a year old, while an eigel ben bakar is a little older.
When the term par (bull) is utilized, however, the term ben bakar would seem superfluous in the sense of defining age, simply because a bull is by definition an adult animal. But the greater question is what is this verse telling us as far as what Aharon brings with him into the Holy?
Many commentaries jump on the opening word of the verse, b’zot (with this), noting that the Hebrew word has a gematria of 410 which is how long the first Temple stood. Aharon carries with him the merit of the first Temple. Ramban quotes a Midrash that Aharon brings with him the merit of zot, a word used to describe many other mitzvoth and qualities, all based on the utilization of the word zot throughout the Bible. The merits he carries with zot include: the Torah (Devarim 4:44), the Covenant of Circumcision (Bereshit 17:10), Shabbos (Isaiah 56:2), Jerusalem (Exekiel 5:5), the tribes (Bereshit 49:28), Judah ((Devarim 33:7), the Congregation of Israel (Song of Songs 7:8), Terumah (donations) (Shmot 25:3), Tithes (Malachi 3:10), and the merit of the offerings in general.
So why the bull and the ram? After all, we learned in Parshat Shmini that Aharon brought a calf as a sin-offering at the time of the dedication of the Mishkan, and many connect his calf offering there as meaning to bring atonement for his involvement in making the
Considering, as Kli Yakar notes, that Aharon’s involvement in the Golden Calf episode was mild — he helped fashion the calf, but never worshiped it, danced before it, or honored it any way — one would think that his calf sin-offering at that time would suffice! And yet, some want to make the connection that the bull is the father of the calf, and Aharon must atone on Yom Kippur for the sin yet again, utilizing the father.
Alshikh has a different view, owing to the reality of the experience of the Kohen Gadol, and the burden he truly carries on his shoulders on Yom Kippur. He is representing everyone and therefore needs all the help he can get.
When we think about the time period of the High Holidays, one of the main themes of Remembrance is our asking G-d to remember the merit of the forefathers.
So Alshikh recalls how when Avraham hosted the three malachim, he fed them ben bakar. And when Yitzchak was bound on the altar at the top of Mt. Moriah, a ram was ultimately offered in
his place.
We often tend to whitewash our own deeds and see ourselves in the right. Most of us would probably justify everything we do that is questionable, where our judgment may not have been top-notch, when our choice in retrospect or in hindsight was not the best. If we could only look back at the things we did with unbiased eyes, we would see a very different picture than the one we paint with our personal rose-colored glasses. As such, we need the merit of the forefathers, because we know who they were and we know how G-d perceived and continues to perceive them. Reminding Him of them in our own words and deeds, is only to our benefit. Which leads me to a very simple observation. We are never judgmental of ourselves. We don’t even need the merit of the forefathers to excuse our bad behaviors. So why are we so judgmental of others? Why do we have such trouble giving people a second chance, perhaps through the merit of our shared forefathers?
Golden Calf.
Destroyed Israeli tank on the Golan Heights near the border with Syria, after the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
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October 7th still hurts like it was yesterday
Certain events get stuck in people’s brains. They are so significant that people remember what took place, where they were, and the first thought they had when they learned the news.
Significant events in that category include the Kennedy Assassination, the Moon Landing, and Sept. 11th.
A year ago, on Oct. 7th, 2023, another event was added to that category of significant events, a horrendous terrorist attack against Israel. The attack was so heinous it will be forever ingrained in the minds of anyone old enough to understand. Like Sept. 11th, this terrorist depravity will be forever known by its date and month, Oct. 7th.
On Oct. 7th, Hamas terrorists exploded through the Gaza border with Israel, breaking an existing cease-fire and murdering around 1,200 people; over 250 people were kidnapped. However, the raw numbers don’t tell the story of what happened.
The terrorists’ murders included unspeakable horrors carried out against people of all ages, even babies. Mothers were murdered in front of children old enough to understand. After mom, the kids were shot in their heads, babies were brutally attacked and burned to death in front of their mothers before the mothers were raped and murdered, men were found dead with limbs cut off, and entire families were found with bullet holes in their heads, their murdered bodies lying next to each other. These were just some examples of heartwrenching slaughter so disgusting it is hard to believe it was conducted by human beings.
On this first anniversary of Oct. 7th, most articles discuss how and why the attack happened, what the Israeli government did right and wrong, the rebuilding of kibbutzim, and the reputation of the IDF and the government; they include interviews with the bereaved and
the families of those who are still being held by the terrorists.
This column takes a different approach. It features Herut members explaining where they were and/or the first thoughts crossing their minds and ingrained in their souls when they first heard news of the Oct. 7th massacre.
You may find some of their comments reassuring, because their reaction may be similar to yours.
Brian Pikelny
My first reaction was to contact my family in Israel to see if they were okay. Most of them live on a kibbutz in the center of the country near Rehovot. But one cousin, who just had a baby, lives in Kibbutz Dorot near Sderot. I was frantic to contact her, and when I heard her kibbutz wasn’t attacked and she and her family were okay, I felt a huge sense of relief.
After the massacre and close to 12 months later, I can only reflect on how this could have happened. After the war is over, as in the Yom Kippur War, there will be an investigation, and hopefully, changes will be made to prevent anything like this from ever happening again. But my first thought is giving land concessions to an enemy that wants to destroy you should never occur again.
As Jews, we pray three times a day, yearning for peace. Peace must come on our terms with guaranteed security for all the people of Israel.
Sarah Martynov
I woke up in my new apartment in Herzliya around 10 am. Groggily, I noticed my phone was on the floor, away from my bed, which was odd. When I picked it up, I was hit with a barrage of notifications about rocket sirens, including some in my area. Confusion and anxiety immediately set in as I scrolled through the English headlines on i24, trying to make sense of what was happening. Messages from friends in the US poured in, checking on my safety, and it became clear that something terrible was unfolding.
I woke up my roommate, who, like me, had slept through the rockets. Initially, she laughed off my concern about finding the bomb shelter, assuming I was overreacting as a worried American. But once she checked her phone, the gravity of the situation hit her, too. We spent the day in stunned silence, glued to the news, while every siren afterward sent me running to the stairwell, shaking in fear of this terrifying new reality.
As we sat on the balcony, watching the news, every passing car made me panic, fearing it could be Hamas advancing further north. Reports from Telegram channels heightened our anxiety as we heard they might be moving closer.
That evening, we both left to stay with others, seeking comfort and safety, but my mind was in turmoil, struggling to process the unfolding horror. Panic, shock, and disbelief consumed me, and it took days before the magnitude of the tragedy fully sank in, allowing me to finally break down and cry. I couldn’t believe something of this scale was happening. Even after Hamas was pushed out of our territory, my thoughts were constantly with the southern residents as more videos and stories of devastation emerged.
Sandra Kessler
It was an idyllic first week of October. We were in the Catskills, in a little house in the woods. I woke up ahead of my husband, made the coffee, settled in at the dining table, and opened my iPad.
The news from Israel hit me in the face like nothing I have ever experienced, not even on 9/11.
Not one to stay paralyzed in a moment of utter shock, I went right to the Herut What’s App convo. What’s going on?
Shabbat was pretty much over in Israel, so my dear Herut family was posting whatever information they already had. One of the first messages I saw was from Yonatan Herzfeld, our very own Lone Soldier Paratrooper Hero, letting everyone know that though he had been in the States and South America enjoying traveling
with his family and on his own, he was flying to Miami to catch a flight for reservists to head back to Israel. My heart swelled with both fear and pride.
The rest of the day passed in a bit of a fog. I just kept watching the news from Israel and posts from Herut. We left early Sunday to drive back to the city. I spent the trip doing the same.
Then I saw the horrifying examples of Israel haters in NYC and all over the major cities of the world, holding celebratory mob actions to congratulate Hamas. I was not totally surprised. Certainly not shocked. I was already very aware of who our haters are, and sadly, I know too many of them personally. I had already become someone who did not hide my beliefs lest someone not like me. The following weeks and months only made me stronger and more defiant in defending my people.
Miriam Fischer
Because we are observant, we were still celebrating the holiday of Simchat Torah, until the evening of the 8th. After the Yom Tov ended, my husband received a phone call from a friend of his, who is a Reform rabbi. She had told him there was an attack in Israel, and it was pretty bad. But at that time, I did not know the scale or the severity of the matter.
I turned on the television, to i24, and that is
See Dunetz on page 26
Days after Oct. 7, the destruction can be seen after the assault by Hamas terrorists in Kibbutz Be’eri, near Gaza border. Oren Ben Hakoon, Flash90
Lessons of Oct. 7 didn’t begin on Oct. 7…
Continued from page 1
JOnAtHAn S. tObin
JnS
Editor-in-Chief
‘Solution’ tried and failed
Belief in the idea of a two-state solution to the conflict evaporated in Israel in the wake of the collapse of the 1993 Oslo Accords with the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000, which brought nearly five years of suicide bombings into every realm of Israeli civilian life.
The two-state concept was once embraced by a majority of Israelis amid the euphoria that ensued when those accords were signed on the White House Lawn in September 1993. But the once-dominant Israeli parties on the left were destroyed when the Palestinians — then led by the arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat, head of the PLO — proved they regarded them as merely a stepping stone to the destruction of the Jewish state.
That point was made even clearer after 2005 when then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon withdrew every Israeli settlement, settler and soldier from Gaza in a vain effort to “disengage” from the Palestinians. Some on the left, especially in the United States and Europe, cling to the lie that Gaza was nevertheless still “occupied” by Israel or an “open-air prison.”
The Strip might have been transformed — with the help of the billions in Western foreign aid — into a Palestinian Singapore; instead, it was taken over by Hamas in 2007, which turned it into a terrorist fortress.
More to the point, it was, for those 16 years
Myths
about the
Palestinians, two states and hopes for an illusory peace must be discarded.
until Oct. 7, an independent Palestinian state in all but name. As such, it was an experiment that demonstrated what a two-state solution that encompassed the far larger and more strategic Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) would mean.
In the years following the Hamas takeover, I took part in dozens of public debates with a liberal colleague, former Forward editor JJ Goldberg, about the two-state solution and related issues.
When I would point out that most Israelis regarded the idea of repeating Sharon’s Gaza experiment in Judea and Samaria as not so much ill-advised but madness, he would invariably respond that his sources in Israel’s intelligence community disagreed. They were sure, he said, that the various efforts at “mowing the grass” — a term that referred to Israel’s periodic efforts to degrade Hamas’ military capabilities with offensive operations in 2009, 2012, 2014, 2019 and 2021, demonstrated that even a terrorist-controlled Palestinian state was no real threat to Israel.
The events of Oct. 7 proved just how wrong they were.
Yet none of this seems to have penetrated the consciousness of the American foreignpolicy establishment.
While there are individual Palestinians who may believe in the idea of peace with Israel, they are isolated and overwhelmingly outnumbered by supporters of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the so-called “moderates” of the Fatah party (whose nearly 89-year-old leader Mahmoud Abbas serves as the head of the Palestinian Authority). They have all made it clear over and over again in their organizational charters, statements and rejection of every effort at a compromise peace plan over the decades that they deny the legitimacy of a Jewish state, no matter where its borders might be drawn.
Only relevant debate
To Israelis and those elsewhere who have been paying attention to Palestinian rejectionism, this is nothing new. Post-Oct. 7, belief in the myth that the conflict can be solved by partitioning the country beggars the imagination.
The point of the mass terror attack wasn’t to end the “occupation” of a coastal enclave that had been evacuated by Israelis 18 years earlier or to push for a withdrawal from Judea and Samaria. It represented a Palestinian desire to turn back the clock to 1947 or even 1917 and destroy the State of Israel, even within the borders that existed before 1967.
The widespread support among Palestinians for this effort (and for the atrocities that ensued) lays bare the futility and the insanity of any attempt to force Israel to make territorial retreats to accommodate yet another attempt at a Palestinian state. Palestinian political culture is solely predicated on the premise that Zionism and a Jewish state are incompatible with the minimum demands of their national identity.
This is something that ought to be clear to all Americans by now. Oct. 7 should have ended the debate about two states and the peace process for the foreseeable future. That is frustrating and hard to grasp for Americans who believe compromise is always possible or for Jews who are hard-wired to believe in millenarian solutions even when the facts on the ground argue otherwise.
At the moment, the only debate about Israel that is relevant is the one that the pro-Hamas mobs that took over America’s streets and college campuses since Oct. 7 have been wanting to have: whether one Jewish state on the planet is one too many.
Calling out antisemites
That is a position many on the American left have increasingly adopted. Indeed, it is the reason why anti-Israel protesters chant “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada.”
The whole point of woke ideology, such as critical race theory and intersectionality, as it applies to the Middle East, is to delegitimize Israel as a “settler/colonial” state. Seen from that perspective, nothing it does in its defense — even against the most barbarous opponents, like Hamas and Hezbollah — can be falsely characterized as “genocide” since there is virtually nothing Israel could do to defend itself that could be justified in their eyes. And it’s why
the same people dismiss the atrocities of Oct. 7 (which, like Holocaust deniers, they simultaneously justify and minimize).
And so, it is incumbent on Israelis and friends of Israel elsewhere to stop bickering over peace plans or pretending that Israel should be “saved from itself,” as former President Barack Obama believed it should.
In the absence of a complete transformation of Palestinian society that is nowhere in sight, any advocacy for a Palestinian state in the post-Oct. 7 world from those who claim to support Israel is a unique form of delusionary thinking.
The only logical way to defend Israel going forward must begin by recognizing this truth and stop treating those who wish to deny Israel the same rights granted to every other nation in the world as if their opinions were reasonable and well-intentioned.
We must not hesitate to call out those who seek to “flood” cities like New York with protests glorifying the Oct. 7 massacres as justified “resistance” — call them out for being antisemites and proponents of foreign terror groups.
After Oct. 7, we must no longer treat those who oppose Israel’s existence as if there was some distinction between their position and that of classic Jew-hatred. The brutal truth is that whether or not they root their stand in what they call “anti-racism” or even if they claim to be Jewish, those who wish to eradicate the only Jewish state on the planet are, at best, the “useful idiots” of the Oct. 7 murderers, rapists and kidnappers. At worst, they are their active supporters.
As much as Israelis can and must sort out the crucial questions about who bears the lion’s share of the blame for the success of Hamas’ brutal surprise attack, there are more important lessons to be learned from this episode than just another repeat of the same questions that were asked after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which began with a similar failure.
Doing so will be extremely hard for liberal Americans who believe in the two-state myth as if it were a religious doctrine handed down from Mount Sinai. But if we fail to learn these lessons, they will set the stage for more such tragedies.
Amidst grief and resolve, Israel stands strong
One year later, Israel stands at a crossroads, tested as never before.
In the face of unimaginable pain, our true strength has emerged. We recognize that this is a fight for our survival.
We also realize that at this moment, the tragedies we face must be converted into an opportunity to redefine our future. The Jewish people must unite, overcome the cracks in our foundation and transform this crisis into a moment of triumph when we build a stronger, more resilient society for generations to come.
Over the past year, we have witnessed the incredible spirit of the Jewish people coming together as a united and powerful force — mobilizing, contributing, supporting and standing resilient in the face of an unthinkable reality — like an unbreakable wall, defending our cherished homeland.
A year has passed, and cracks are beginning to appear beneath the surface. Sometimes subtle and unseen, they creep down to the roots, threatening to weaken our foundation and destabilize us.
The war forced upon us a year ago is not just a battle against an enemy intent on our physical destruction, it is a fight for our core values and our right to live securely on this land.
In these sacred days between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, the value of life is placed front and center as it says, “Remember us for life, O
King who desires life.”
As a people who cherish life, live for life and toast to life, it is our moral and historical duty to transform this crisis into an opportunity for growth and renewal.
From the depths of mourning and loss, and from the deep roots that bind us to this land, we will stand strong, rebuild and flourish. Amid the confusion and the economic and social challenges, we will keep building our shared future — step by step, brick by brick. As long as we remain united and resolute in defending our future, no force on earth can break us.
In this battle for survival, there is no room for compromise. We are all in this together, committed to a single, vital goal: securing the future of the Jewish people and the State of Israel.
A year has passed since the unspeakable horrors of Oct. 7. Yet we have demonstrated that our enemy cannot and will not defeat us. With unwavering clarity, we say loudly and unequivocally: We are here to stay. For the entire Jewish people, whether they live here, will live here, or even if they never will live in this land, Israel is the home of all of us. There is no alternative.
Our unity is not optional; it is essential.
Yaakov Hagoel is chairman of the executive of the World Zionist Organization. He was formerly acting chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel.
PHOTO AT RIGHT: Students at Jewish schools throughout metro New York echoed our columnist, who writes, “With unwavering clarity, we say loudly and unequivocally: We are here to stay.” HALB students (pictured) marked “One Year of Pain and Strength” with various programs, culminating with a school-wide kumzitz. “It was truly a beautiful and meaningful day,” HALB said. “When the world is filled with darkness, we will stand proud as Jews and be the light.” YAAKOV
Destroying the Jews, destroying the world
DAPHNA SHULL
The-Braid.org
As a 32-year-old American Jew, it didn’t take long after Oct. 7 to realize that my entire life had been predicated on one fantastical belief: Antisemitism was, on the whole, eradicated from Western society.
Like many people, my first personal interaction with wildfire antisemitism was online. As my Instagram timeline became consumed with anti-Zionist rhetoric, my good friend from college reposted a video that shattered me. She shared a feature by a queer Jew expounding on all the reasons we Jews have been lied to by our own community. My friend, who is not Jewish, then wrote, “Jews who believe in Israel should take a hard look at themselves and get on the right side of history.”
I immediately ached for the days growing up as a Jewish kid during the turn of the 21st century.
Despite everything, Jews survive. We dream, create, educate, and have a knack for turning coal into the most sought-after diamonds on earth.
This was a time when we learned about tikkun olam while trying to emulate Kobe Bryant on the basketball court. Where my non-Jewish classmates in Tampa, Fla., embraced my Judaism with curiosity and love, joining my family for Chanukah celebrations and becoming proud members of our school’s Jewish Awareness Club.
•No stranger called me sick for supporting a “genocidal, apartheid state.”
•No former crush marched down the street chanting threatening slogans manufactured by terrorist organizations.
•No friend brazenly and self-righteously claimed to understand my own history better than me.
This was also a time when Holocaust survivors shared the hell they somehow managed to survive, and non-Jews remembered that they, too, had fought an existential threat to everything they value.
Unfortunately, Jews don’t have the luxury of forgetting.
From slavery in Egypt to Oct. 7, millions of our ancestors have been humiliated, chased from their homes, tortured, raped and brutally murdered. And yet, we Jews survive. And not only survive — we thrive.
We dream, create, educate ourselves and have a knack for turning coal into the most sought-after diamonds on earth.
Men like Hungarian-American film-industry executive William Fox and the four Warner brothers built Hollywood. Ruth Bader Ginsberg advanced gender equality as the first Jewish U.S. Supreme Court Justice. Levi Strauss invented a jean company in 1853 that Beyoncé just wrote a banger about.
So if Jewish people provide so much good and progress in the world, why are we eternally demonized and persecuted?
In Mark Twain’s 1899 essay “Concerning the
Jews,” he deduces that through centuries of economic exclusion, “the one tool which the law was not able to take from him [the Jew] — his brain — have made that tool singularly competent” and others were “unable to compete with the average Jew.”
David Wolpe, emeritus rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and a scholar on antisemitism, states that “Jews committed the unforgivable act of introducing conscience to the world. … For most of human history up to Sinai, what the gods cared about was how you treated them. … The Ten Commandments said G-d cares about how you treat each other. And that call to conscience
means a call to sin and guilt.”
Or maybe the answer is analogous to Lord Voldemort’s contempt of Harry Potter. As Dumbledore explains to Harry, “If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand, it is love. He didn’t realize that love as powerful as your mother’s for you leaves its own mark. … It was agony to touch a person marked by something so good.”
Sometimes, amid the whiplash of antisemitism, we become disoriented to the fact that this hate is not about us. The Jewish people have been, and will always be, a mirror reflecting back the jealousy, self-loathing and bitterness in the souls of man.
Even as the pain remains, resilience endures
The dust has not settled because the pain still runs deep. The barbarism of that day, when infants, siblings and parents were brutally slaughtered, is a tragedy that many have tried to rationalize or obscure. As Joseph Stalin once remarked, “Kill one person, and it’s a tragedy; kill many, and it’s a statistic.”
The world has moved on, shifting its focus to other events, allowing the memory of that Black Shabbat to fade or be twisted into political narratives.
Yet for the people of Israel and Jews worldwide, the horrors have not ended. Hundreds of hostages, including a Jewish baby, remain hidden in Gaza’s underground tunnels beyond the reach of humanitarian aid or the Red Cross. A year later, they remain trapped, while their captors evade condemnation. For those who stand with Israel, this pain is unyielding.
The captives are more than headlines; they are mothers, fathers, children and friends. Each passing day weighs heavily as we grapple with a question that echoes through history: How do we endure when the world turns its back on our suffering?
When Jews are persecuted simply for being Jews — when hatred rears its head as it did during the Crusades, the Inquisition, the pogroms and the Holocaust — it is an attempt to erase us from history. Yet history has shown that such attempts only strengthen our resolve. In the months since Oct. 7, Jews around the world have set aside differences and come together. The one positive outcome of such oppression is that it unites us, reminding us of our shared identity, our faith and our strength.
Since biblical times, we have placed our trust in G-d, not in allies who shift their loyalties with the changing winds.
After Oct. 7, a stunned nation grieved. We watched videos of our “neighbors” beheading children, gunning down households, raping young women and mutilating the innocent. We buried our dead, mourned their loss and felt the world’s indifference as the narrative shifted against us.
As the dust settled, the world’s attention turned away, and media outlets began framing the aftermath of the massacre within a false “context,” ignoring the heinousness of the original acts. Antisemitism reared its ugly head on college campuses and in public spaces, where Jews were
harassed and attacked simply for existing. We witnessed the bizarre transformation of “sanction” — a word that means both to approve and to penalize — as the world sanctioned our suffering while condoning protests that targeted us.
This conflation of Jewish identity with political ideology created a dangerous atmosphere
Israelis and Jews worldwide refuse to be shamed into submission.
where every Jew became a target. Regardless of one’s political stance, being Jewish became synonymous with being an “oppressor.”
This twisted logic was used to justify assaults, harassment and expulsion from dormitories and lecture halls. Still, even as hatred flared, our spirit did not break. We stood firm, recognizing that the true battle was not just for Israel’s survival but for the soul of the Jewish people.
In the past year, the psychological impact of Oct. 7 has become evident. The pain hasn’t faded, but the Jewish community has responded with compassion, solidarity and action. We have opened our homes to refugees, fed the hungry and offered comfort to the grieving. Our collective trauma has inspired a renewed commitment to charity, kindness and faith. For Jews in Israel and the Diaspora, this year has been a time of reflection and resilience.
Many have reexamined their political beliefs, their sense of identity and their relationship with G-d. There’s been a resurgence in religious observance with Jews finding solace in prayer, study and community. This return to faith is not about fanaticism but about finding strength in our traditions and values.
The world is unaccustomed to seeing Israel fight back. When Israelis say “never again,” it’s a declaration that they will not be passive in the face of hatred and violence. This assertion of strength has invited condemnation, with many quick to criticize Israel’s actions while remaining silent about the atrocities that provoked them. Despite the roars of disapproval, Israelis and Jews worldwide refuse to be shamed into submission. We remember the silence that greeted our suffering and the accusations hurled at us when we defended ourselves. But we also remember that our strength lies in our unity, in our unwavering belief that we have a right to exist, to thrive and to protect our people.
The events of Oct. 7 wounded us deeply,
Women protesting in Tel Aviv on Jan. 19, calling for the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas terrorists in Gaza. Tomer Neuberg, Flash90
RABBI DR. DAVID FOX
Chai Lifeline Crisis Services
Cottonbro Studio, Pexels
See Shull on page 26
Freedman… Dunetz…
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Gladwell’s “tipping point” is what causes a disease to go from infecting a few scattered victims to becoming a fill fledged epidemic, turn the entire world economy around, or catapult an unknown artist to become a worldwide sensation in a matter of days.
Often, the actual moment or series of seemingly unconnected events goes unnoticed by everyone, including often even those who are themselves responsible for what subsequently transpires.
The story of Effie Eitam, a captain in an elite infantry reconnaissance unit on that fateful Yom Kippur afternoon, is a case in point. Eitam was responsible for a small five-man recon unit that was on duty while most of the battalion had actually gone home on leave for Yom Kippur.
By 2:15 that afternoon it was clear Israel was in dire straits and Effie and his small unit were sent north of the main base of Nafach to observe the Syrian forces and hopefully relay information back to base on enemy troop movements.
Division headquarters were in urgent need of an accurate picture of what was going on, as the scattered and panicked reports coming in over the radio became increasingly desperate.
As the commando unit deployed in the fields of the northeastern Golan, they were shocked to see over 400 Syrian tanks heading their way. They quickly realized that their eyes were not playing tricks with them and that there were, in fact, five Syrian brigades were on the move with not a single Israeli tank to stop them.
Being a forward reconnaissance unit, the commandoes only had one portable anti-tank weapon with them and Effie had to decide what to do. On the one hand, it was absurd to imagine that even if they succeeded in taking out one tank, it would make a difference to the course of the war, with hundreds of Syrian tanks only hours away from Haifa and Tel Aviv.
On the other hand, if you are an elite Israeli
commando unit, and Syrian tanks are advancing on the towns and villages of your country, how can you not fire the anti-tank weapon you are holding?
In the end, with what seemed to him to be no choice, Effie targeted the tank with what seemed to have the most antennas (signifying a command-tank) and ordered his men to fire the missile.
As the tank they hit burst into flames, the entire Syrian advance inexplicably stopped in its tracks.
It was only years later, as a young colonel, that he finally had the opportunity to analyze the battle’s recon photos and radio reports, and discover that he had hit the tank of the forward battalion commander leading the advance. As a result of the confusion that ensued, and believing they might be heading into an ambush, the entire Syrian advance stalled for nearly six critical hours, by which time the first Israeli troops arrived at the front lines.
That single anti-tank shell, it seems, may well have been the tipping point in the Yom Kippur war. And even though the road for the IDF was still very much uphill, the point of no return had passed and the momentum switched sides.
Is there always a tipping point in our own lives, a tipping point of consciousness when we start to “get it,” when we come to an understanding that changes who we are and the way we look at life and that allows us to turn our lives around and become all that we can be?
As Yom Kippur approaches, we have an opportunity to find such a “tipping point,” to reach deep inside of ourselves and decide that this year things will be different.
This week we consider what we hope to accomplish in the new year and what we wish to change. It’s also time to find our personal tipping point, that one moment of prayer or act of kindness toward a fellow human being that will set us on the right path and turn everything around. May we be so blessed.
Wishing you all a meaningful Yom Kippur, and a year full of peace joy, and good health.
New Yorkers
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Continued from page 22 when I started getting a better idea about what happened. It took a while for me to understand the depth and the depravity of what happened. Also, I’m the kind of person that takes some time for me to mentally and emotionally digest a situation.
Once I fully comprehended everything that had happened initially, I felt a combination of anger and sadness. I was angry at the depravity. I was angry at the loss of life. I was angry because there were people who were just out to dance, and they lost their lives or were tortured, and some are still in captivity to this day.
I’m still at a loss for words for what happened and because it’s harder for me to completely grasp Oct. 7th since I don’t live in Israel. However, I still feel the sadness of missing our people. I feel anger about how we could let this happen. Part of me has this damn everything, let’s destroy them all attitude, but then we would be no better than the terrorists.
So now I do my best to tell people what’s going on, what’s happening, how we feel as the Jewish people, and how we’re dealing with the incredible upsurge and antisemitism that has occurred since Oct. 7th.
Jeff Dunetz
Suffering from a debilitating disorder that has since been diagnosed and treated, Baruch HaShem, I was sleeping long into the afternoon on Oct. 7th when my wife woke me up crying, “It’s horrible, it’s horrible.”
She explained that there was a terrible terrorist attack in Israel. Kids at an outdoor concert were slaughtered, terrorists rampaged through the parts of Israel bordering Gaza, and in some places it was still going on.
Well into the night, and for the next few days, I kept flipping through cable news channels and browsing through internet news sites. That’s when I first noticed the secular outlets call the terrorists “militants.” I wondered, at the time, if they would have called other terrorists, the ones that were killing people other than Jews, militants.
I don’t remember when I first heard the confirmed report of terrorists setting some babies and young children on fire, causing them to die a horrible, painful death. Others were “mercifully” shot in the head before they were set on fire. That’s when I broke down and started to cry. “Babies, Babies,” aren’t any of these terrorist animals, fathers?
Oct. 7 was my painful orientation to this Jewish legacy.
We are a nation destined to confront the worst of humanity, and in turn, understand the ultimate blessing of peace.
Is this what it means to be G-d’s “chosen people?” To receive the highest highs and lowest lows? To be the intergenerational model of joy and grief? To, as Wolpe noted, be the eternal conscience of human morality?
If there’s any proof of this, one must look to arguably the most evil human being in history: Adolf Hitler. An ounce of Jewish blood was a threat he could not tolerate. He said, “Conscience is a Jewish invention,” and he spent his life trying to destroy it by any means necessary.
So if consciousness is the liberator of the human mind and murdering the Jews is the annihilation of consciousness, then destroying the Jews is the intentional destruction of self-awareness. If the Jews are gone, the ability to know oneself is compromised.
Objective reality would be subject to endless manipulation, and the inversion of truth would be sacrosanct. Progress and freedom would cease to exist. Kindness and love would lose their meaning. Good would disappear, and the light that guides nations would be extinguished.
If you destroy the Jews, you destroy yourself. If you destroy the Jews, you destroy the world.
Daphna Shull is a writer, visual artist, musician and photographer who works as the creative producer for the-braid.org
Continued from page 22
but they did not defeat us. The Jewish people have faced countless attempts at annihilation throughout history, and each time, we have emerged stronger.
Today, we continue to stand together, united by our shared pain but also by our shared hope for a better future. Our resilience is our answer to those who seek to destroy us. The memory of our lost ones will never fade, but neither will our commitment to life, faith, each other and human decency. Long after the dust settles, long after the world forgets, the Jewish people will endure. We were wounded but are healing. We are here to stay.
Years from now, when I look back on Oct.7th, my first thought will be those little babies set on fire by soulless creatures.
Oct. 7th was one year ago, but it still hurts like it was yesterday.
A version of article was published in the newsletter of Herut North America, an international movement for Zionist pride and education dedicated to the ideals of pre-WWII Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky [HerutNA.org]. Jeff Dunetz, longtime columnist for The Jewish Star, publishes The Lid at LidBlog.com.
As we move forward, we invite others to stand with us — not out of pity or obligation but out of recognition that the fight against hatred is a fight for humanity itself. Let Oct. 7 be a reminder not just of the horrors we endured, but of the strength, compassion and resilience that define us.
Rabbi Dr. David Fox, a forensic and clinical psychologist, is the director of Chai Lifeline’s Crisis Services.
Biden… Trump…
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joined by the Jewish Second Gentleman, Doug Emhoff, planted a pomegranate tree at the vice president’s residence in memory of the 1,200 people killed on Oct. 7.
“We all must ensure nothing like the horrors of Oct. 7 ever happen again,” Harris said. “I will do everything in my power to ensure that the threat Hamas poses is eliminated, that it is never again able to govern Gaza, that it fails in its mission to annihilate Israel, and that the people of Gaza are free from the grip of Hamas.”
Harris added: “I will never stop fighting for the release of all of the hostages, including the seven American citizens, living and deceased, still held: Omer, Edan, Sagui, Keith, Judy, Gad, and Itay. I will never stop fighting for justice for those who murdered Hersh Goldberg-Polin and other Americans. And I will always ensure Israel has what it needs to defend itself against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists like Hamas. My commitment to the security of Israel is unwavering.”
Visiting the resting place of the righteous is a long-held tradition in Judaism. The Talmud recounts how Caleb visited Hebron to pray at the Maarat Hamachpela, resting place of the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs. Resting places of Jewish mystics and sages in Israel and Europe are considered sacred spaces and have been visited by Jews and non-Jews for centuries.
The timing of Trump’s visit — two days after Rosh Hashana — is significant, as special emphasis is placed on visiting these sites on the days leading into the High Holy Days.
Danny Gejerman, a Queens resident, said he heard Trump was coming and hadn’t been to the Ohel for a long time, so he decided to visit, JTA reported.
“He knows that he has the support of the Jews and he knows that he needs the support of the majority of Jews in order to win this election,” Gejerman said.
