Instead, she walked past broken toilets, scraps of metal and bags of trash. The former site of Latvia’s Jungfernhof concentration camp was a dumping ground. Frostig, an artist and art professor at Boston’s Lesley University, had recently learned from archival documents that her grandparents, Moses Frostig and Beile Samuely, likely perished at Jungfernhof and not in the Riga ghetto as she long thought.

It was the end of March, and Frostig and her guide had bundled up in winter coats. “I was terrified to go there,” Frostig told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I felt like I was walking into extreme danger. But then there was this magical experience. All of sudden we see these yellow butterflies, in winter. I felt this combination of fear and a spiritual journey of recovery. I knew I wanted to do a memorial of some sort.”

Over the last 17 years, Frostig has worked with a dogged determination to recognize the victims of Jungfernhof, a camp that’s not extensively documented. Nearly 4,000 German and Austrian Jews died there, but few photos exist and any records were destroyed. Frostig has forged connections with survivors and descendants of victims worldwide, while spearheading an effort to install a memorial on site. Her project now has the support of Latvian officials.

Efforts are a critical step for Latvia, a country that’s only recently begun to grapple with the part it played in the Holocaust. Decades behind other European countries in restitution efforts for victims and heirs, the country only in 2022 allocated funds — $46 million — for the first time to reimburse the Jewish community for buildings the Nazis expropriated.

“Before, a prevailing opinion was that Latvian history and Jewish history were separate,” said Ilya Lensky, director at Riga’s Jews in Latvia museum. “Nobody would say anything like that today. That is very important progress.”

When she was growing up in Waltham, Massachusetts, Frostig’s father, Benjamin, who escaped Austria before the war, didn’t want to talk about his parents, though their passport photos hung on the living room wall. After art school, Frostig embarked on a career painting abstract images and worked in art therapy.

In 1991, she discovered a box in her mother’s basement containing documents detailing her father’s departure from Europe. Years later, she inherited letters he and his parents exchanged. Frostig had them translated into English. Soon after, she got Austrian citizenship. While in Vienna, it struck her that the city’s existing Holocaust memorials didn’t speak to her as a descendent. “They felt impersonal,” she said.

She went on to create a large-scale, interactive Holocaust-related memory project on the streets of Vienna. In 2013, Frostig’s “Vienna Project” marked the 75th anniversary of the Nazi’s takeover of Austria. It included 38 memory sites visitors learned about through an app, and projected the names of over 91,000 Austrian victims of National Socialism on the walls of the Austrian National Library and Hofburg Palace.

Then, Frostig once again set her sights on Latvia.

Memorialization efforts in Latvia ramped up after the country regained its independence from the Soviets in 1991. But Holocaust memory remains a work in progress, according to the Holocaust Remembrance Project, a 2019 report rating how European Union countries face up their Holocaust pasts. As in many post-Soviet countries, controversy remains around the scale of Latvian collaboration.

“Today, there is a much better Holocaust reconstruction infrastructure with museums and exhibitions,” said Peter Klein, author of the book “The ‘Final Solution’ in Riga” and dean of the master’s degree program in Holocaust communication and tolerance at Touro University Berlin. “With a Jungfernhof memorial, this would be a decisive step forward.”

Lensky said efforts were made in the 1990s to memorialize Jungfernhof, but consensus was the site was too remote. When Frostig returned with a memorial proposal three years after her initial visit, interest was lackluster.

In 2019, she went back. This time, officials were amenable and they asked that her plans start with a search for a mass grave containing hundreds of bodies described by eyewitnesses. Frostig got to work forming a team of historians and scientists and raising funds.

“Latvian society is a bit afraid of things parachuted in,” said Lensky, referring to local involvement from people living outside of Latvia. “But Karen has a great ability to bring people to her cause, including those who may not initially be interested.”

By this point, officials had transformed the land into a public park. Locals rollerbladed past a large fountain. There was a dog run, places to barbecue. A sign described the area’s history — since the 1700s it was a farming estate — and mentioned “a concentration camp, where German and Austrian Jews were imprisoned, who were performing agricultural work here.” There was nothing about their murders.

“I want there to be a permanent memorial at the park that speaks the truth about the history and what happened in this park,” Frostig told JTA.

Jungfernhof’s story starts in 1941. Frostig’s grandparents left Vienna for Latvia in December on Transport No. 13. That winter, Europe’s coldest on record, many of the Jews who arrived from Nuremberg, Hamburg, Stuttgart and Vienna died right away. Prisoners slept in stone buildings meant for animals with little light, no heat or water.

Jungfernhof survivor Alfred Winter wrote in his memoir that after the crops were planted, Kommandant Rudolf Seck remarked that “Dead Jews make good fertilizer.”

Fred Zeilberger, one of Jungfernhof’s 149 survivors, stacked fellow dead prisoners like firewood when they couldn’t be buried because the ground was frozen. He was 12. In the spring, the Germans buried the bodies and made Zeilberger plant potatoes on top.

Miles away in the BiÄ·ernieki forest, the Nazis shot “sardine-style” hundreds of mostly elderly Jews and children deemed not fit for work in what was known as the DĂŒnamĂŒnde Aktion.

Zeilberger has been a faithful participant of monthly survivor and descendant Zoom meetings Frostig organized. “What Karen is doing is unbelievable,” he said. “She’s a go-getter.”

In the summer of 2021, Frostig’s team started work at Jungfernhof guided by a 1917 aerial map German pilots captured, 3D map models made by drones, and survivor testimony. Using ground penetrating radar and other geophysical techniques, they searched. The rabbi of Riga gave permission to take soil samples, a practice not typically permitted around Jewish graves.

“We’re looking for the hidden history,” said Philip Reeder, a geographer and cartographer at Duquesne University involved in the project. Reeder has worked on Holocaust sites across Eastern Europe, including in the Warsaw Ghetto. “There are lots more things that need to go in the history books,” he said.

A suspected trench discovered early on turned out to be the foundation of a former farm building. The team found tar, nails and animal bones. To date, they’ve surveyed around one acre of the five-acre site.

“We’re 100% sure there’s a mass grave there somewhere,” Reeder said. “All we can do is keep returning.” Finding the grave could protect it from future development. “Karen’s passion and enthusiasm for the project is infectious and uplifting,” added Reeder, who returns to Latvia this summer.

This spring Frostig organized an event at Brandeis University, where she is an affiliated scholar, to bring survivors and descendants together in person for the first time, a “Day of Remembrance” dedicated to developing community around memory.

The event opened with an immersive video installation of victims’ names scrolling against the backdrop of deportation videos to Latvia. Descendants, from their 20s to their 90s, pointed to ancestors’ names in the candlelit room.

“To see each other in person represented a special gift for us,” said Trish Acostas, whose mother, Joanna, survived Jungfernhof. Her grandparents died there. “It was restorative and clarifying. We’re learning how to talk about our experience as the next generation.”

On the event’s last day, Frostig unveiled a large-scale embroidered mourning shroud she created printed with victims’ names. Descendants carried it outside, laid it on soil from Jungfernhof Lensky brought, and said the Mourner’s Kaddish.

“Art is such an important part of how we remember,” Frostig said.

She hopes to bring an updated version of the shroud to Latvia, then include it in temporary museum exhibits telling the story of Jungfernhof. Before that, complicated questions need answering — where is the grave, what should a memorial look like, and how should a memorial operate in a recreational park? The local municipality will also need to grant permission.

Lensky said, “We will have a lot of discussions about what the memorial will be, but we will have it.”

Plans include installing an updated plaque this year that gives a fuller picture of the atrocities that occurred there. A groundbreaking ceremony for a memorial would, she hopes, follow in 2025, with descendants and survivors attending.

“It’s clear that memory is not one person,” said Frostig. “It’s a community. The meaning is when we come together.”

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He is now working to raise awareness about the need to preserve and study the remains of the footwear, including identifying their owners, wrote The Guardian. He said the area “should have been fenced off, first and foremost, right from the start.”

Kwiatkowski has called for forensic and other experts to find out where the shoes came from and who owned them “in honor and commemoration of the victims.”

“They should now be dug out—and not only preserved and put on display but thoroughly examined by experts to find out who owned them,” he said, adding that they should be “the pride of the museum authorities.”

The Polish government is said to be exploring options on measures to save them.

“The past is not the past, it’s the present,” Kwiatkowski said. “Ignoring the artifacts of genocide is a scandal, and this scandal radiates.”

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Then a protest erupted on the sidewalk. “Free, free Palestine!” a handful of protesters shouted. Several of the congregants approached the protesters, shouting “Get out of here!”

The two guards – a middle-aged woman and a younger man – stepped between the two groups to separate them, but matters began to escalate. The pro-Palestinian demonstrators hurled stones at the counter-protesters, then a knife-wielding attacker rushed toward the crowd and stabbed one of the guards.

The other guard and several congregants tackled the assailant, disarmed him, and called police.

While this incident might seem plausible to many, it didn’t actually happen. It was a staged scenario at a retreat this week in Pennsylvania, meant to train volunteer synagogue guards to make decisions under pressure. The knife was rubber, the suspicious student and protesters were other guards-in-training, and the stones were balls of fabric.

The annual gathering is run by the Community Security Service, which trains members of hundreds of synagogues to guard their congregations, and has taken place twice before. This year, following Oct. 7, CSS is placing more of a focus on countering anti-Israel and Islamist demonstrators, and on responding to protest and harassment in addition to violent attacks. The group has also seen significant growth in the past seven months.

“The anti-Israel protests have created additional layers of complexity,” Richard Priem, CSS’ interim director, told the New York Jewish Week, which was granted exclusive access to the three-day retreat. “Our volunteers need to adapt and be prepared to deal with intense situations that are not necessarily always a violent threat but more has to do with intimidation and harassment and making sure that they can still maintain access control, making sure that they can still secure Jewish life so everything continues.”

As law enforcement and Jewish groups have documented a spike in antisemitism since Oct. 7, CSS has seen demand for its services increase. Ahead of the Hamas attack, around 300 synagogues were part of the CSS network; now there are more than 400. The group is also expanding a program it runs that dispatches security volunteers to Jewish community events in the tri-state area, and plans on launching teams in Los Angeles and Miami in addition to the ones in New York City and Washington, D.C..

That follows an earlier jump after the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting and violent attacks on Jewish institutions in 2019. In the past four years, CSS’s staff has grown from two to 18 and the number of volunteers from a few hundred to around 4,000. The organization is funded by donations, and in 2022, tax filings showed the New York City-based group had $5 million in revenue.

Jonathan, 25, a volunteer from a Manhattan synagogue, said his community had started organizing security volunteers after Oct. 7 and joined CSS in January. The synagogue felt vulnerable after the Hamas invasion of Israel, he said.

“We were discussing it for a while. It wasn’t until after Oct. 7 that enough people said, “OK, let’s make this happen,” said Jonathan, who gave only his first name per the policy of the retreat, which also kept names of synagogues off the record due to security concerns.

Many synagogues rely on private security or off-duty police officers to guard their entrances. Some rely on hired guards and volunteers. Jonathan said his synagogue chose to train its members in part because it was inspired by stories of civilian Israelis who saved others during Hamas’ invasion of Israel, which targeted communities that were largely surrounded by fences and guard posts.

“Much of the Oct. 7 attack was against communities that were ‘secure,’” he said.

Some synagogues turn to volunteers because hiring security is too expensive and government security grants — which can be onerous to obtain — offer only limited funding for guards.

CSS also makes the case that volunteers are familiar with the membership of their synagogue and its culture, so are more able to spot outsiders or suspicious behaviors. In New York, strict laws regulate police interactions with the public, such as laws barring any kind of profiling, rules that do not apply to volunteers.

Jonathan, the volunteer from Manhattan, said the team at his synagogue had been working in shifts in recent months, with team members performing security sweeps and monitoring for threats inside and outside the building.

“I feel like it’s my responsibility, in that I shouldn’t have to outsource my security to other people,” he said. “Why should someone else have to step up to protect my synagogue and security?”

Around 75 volunteers came to the retreat from across the country — with around half coming from the tri-state area. The setting was a far cry from the city, though: It was held on the grounds of a Jewish center in verdant, rural Pennsylvania. A guard checked vehicles at the entrance and deer scrambled across the driveway just beyond the gate.

The group skewed middle-aged and older, male and Orthodox, and included doctors, lawyers and one former NFL Super Bowl champion. The synagogues represented ranged from Reconstructionist to Orthodox congregations.

CSS sends trainers to synagogues around the country to drill them in security protocol, but the retreat provided more advanced training to experienced guards and volunteers in leadership roles. Participants also heard from experts from Jewish communities abroad, in addition to officials from the Department of Homeland Security and former NYPD officers.

Participants trained in security measures including sweeping a synagogue for threats, questioning suspicious individuals, the Israeli martial art krav maga and reacting to a thrown explosive. They also trained on how to lock down buildings and learned about tactics to counter aggressive protesters.

“This is a higher-level, more experienced people, people with more potential. It helps grow the training capacity and capability,” said Michael, a volunteer and CSS team leader at a synagogue in Westchester who has 12 years of experience. Michael, attending the retreat for the third time, monitored his synagogue’s security cameras through an app on his phone while at the retreat, saying he had been on “constant alert” since Oct. 7.

Instructors traveled to the retreat from Jewish communities in the United Kingdom, Australia and South Africa, countries with smaller Jewish communities that have made use of a volunteer security model for decades.

Those countries and U.S. cities have seen similar protests. Disruptive pro-Palestinian car convoys appeared in the United Kingdom, for example, and have also come to New York, Los Angeles, and other cities, while protest groups in the United States have posted “toolkits” online that foreign groups have access to. Other instructors were Israeli consultants based in the United States.

While protests in New York have not seen any deadly violence or severe beatings of Jews, like demonstrations during the 2021 Gaza war, they have still subjected some synagogue-goers to intimidation and harassment, sparking fears among congregants. Synagogues across the country have also been targeted with a rash of fake bomb threats.

But despite the protests, deadly violence is still seen as more of a threat from the far-right, Priem said — echoing the longstanding assessments of watchdogs like the Anti-Defamation League, which partners with CSS. The Tree of Life shooter, for example, was a right-wing extremist motivated by the antisemitic “great replacement” conspiracy theory.

“The actual attacks, terror, there’s still more of those that have happened from the white supremacist angle,” Priem said, adding that the group has always kept threats from radical Islamists in mind, even if they’re not the focus.

“We’re not changing our core training,” he said, but have added additional layers to factor in anti-Israel protests, such as the scenario of a demonstration outside the synagogue.

“That scenario was an example of how the volunteers are trained in keeping both the congregants safe but also keeping counter-protesters separate,” Priem said. “It is not the interest of CSS that there’s escalation. Our goal is always to de-escalate and prevent.”

The program, and the partnerships between the different security groups, have notched several successes in recent years. In 2022, a CSS volunteer noticed a threatening post on social media. CSS relayed the threat to the Community Security Initiative, a New York City-based Jewish security agency, which sent the information to police, who made two arrests and found a knife, a handgun and a Nazi armband with the suspects.

In 2021, volunteers in the Bronx pursued and snapped a photo of a suspect who had carried out a string of acts of vandalism against Jewish institutions in the area, leading to his arrest.

In December, in Washington, D.C., volunteer guards blocked an assailant who attempted to attack congregants with a foul-smelling spray outside a synagogue while shouting “Gas the Jews.”

During the scenario training, the volunteers prepared for similar situations. An Israeli consultant told them to be proactive while guarding their synagogues.

“You’re not standing like a mezuzah at the door,” the trainer said. “Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. I don’t want to see people freezing.”

In one scenario, congregants filed out of the “synagogue” when a mock bomb landed nearby. In another, the guards locked down the synagogue as a mob of protesters banged on the building’s windows.

Another trainer, from South Africa, hid fake bombs in and around a building to train volunteers in how to systematically sweep a synagogue before services. “Everything past here is clean,” a volunteer said as she entered from a side room. “We’ve got a suspicious backpack over there,” another said.

During krav maga training on an outdoor basketball court, an Israeli instructor drilled participants on forming a “helmet” with their arms around their head to block strikes. The group practiced scenarios, including where to stand while another volunteer questions a suspicious person, what to do if someone throws a punch during questioning, and how to charge at someone who’s carrying a knife.

“It delivers a message to him,” the instructor said. “I’m no longer a victim, I’m willing to fight.”

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The competition’s winner is determined by a complex system in which juries for each participating country allocate half of all votes, while the public contributes the other half. Golan’s success — which exceeded expectations set in betting markets before the competition — was fueled by the popular vote, which Israel won in 14 countries plus a new category for voters not located in any of the participating countries. Israel did not win any country’s jury vote.

Golan’s strength in the popular vote came in contrast to the intense protests against her and Israel’s participation in the song contest amid the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Tens of thousands of people protested in the streets of Malmo, Sweden, during the competition held there, and Golan was reportedly advised to remain in her hotel room under the protection of security.

The tensions crept into the competition as well. During a rehearsal, a Finnish representative seemingly refused to say that her country had awarded points to Israel, while Ireland’s Bambie Thug, another contestant, said she “cried” after Golan made the final and would have boycotted had she herself not been performing. A journalist asked Golan at a press conference whether she felt that “by being here you bring risk and danger for other participants;” she drew cheers after responding that the contest was “safe for everyone.”

Iolande, representing Portugal, wore fingernails decorated with patterns suggesting Palestinian solidarity in the final, despite rules set by the European Broadcasting Union prohibiting political speech during Eurovision. Earlier, a contestant drew a reprimand for wearing a keffiyeh, or Palestinian scarf.

Golan returned to Israel on Sunday, ahead of the country’s somber Memorial Day. “I felt the love from the people, and you cannot understand how much it helped me,” she said during a press conference. Alluding to the Israeli hostages who remain in Gaza, she added, “I represented the country and was our voice for everyone who needs to be brought home now.”

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“Do come to my atelier one of these days, and I will show you my latest creations. But on the Sabbath my studio is closed,” IsraĂ«ls (1824-1911), who had a strong Jewish education including studying the Talmud, told one visitor. He was said to have promised his dying father that he would observe the Sabbath.

Despite his Orthodox upbringing, Israels didn’t turn in earnest to Jewish subjects until his upper 60s.

His nearly square-sized 1903 painting “Jewish Wedding,” in the collection of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, shows a groom in a top hat placing a ring on a bride’s finger—both of them draped in a tallit.

He depicted a peddler in Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter in his “A Son of the Ancient Race” (c. 1889), one version of which can be found at the Jewish Museum in New York. The subject is “a humble member of his own religion,” the museum notes.

In his 1898 painting “Saul and David,” in the collection of Amsterdam’s Stedelijk, Israels suggested the landscape of Jerusalem in a view in the background between an open curtain, as the future Jewish king plays the harp to calm the incumbent royal.

Abby Schwartz, curatorial consultant and director emerita at the Skirball Museum in Cincinnati, wrote her master’s thesis on Israels.

“One way to describe him is as the 19th-century Rembrandt. He was a master of light, and one of the few artists of his generation to focus on people rather than landscape,” Schwartz told JNS. “His scenes of everyday life were masterful—elevating the mundane to the spiritual.”

Israels was one of the founders of the late 19th-century Hague School, which focused on everyday people and landscapes. After living in Amsterdam and Paris, Israels settled in the Dutch fishing village of Zandvoort, drawn to the sea and fishermen.

“He was learned as a Jew, and his domestic scenes reflect a reverence for traditional women’s work—sewing, mending, spinning, caring for children,” Schwartz said. “I believe his legacy survives as a painter, who was famous in his own time and whose works were widely known in the form of prints of many of his important paintings.”

Schwartz noted that Israels painted several pictures of Jewish scholars studying, including one of a Jewish scribe that she called “deeply evocative.”

“He’s complicated,” she said. “He was careful to describe himself as a Dutch artist, not a Jewish artist.”

Ori Soltes, a Georgetown University professor, author and former director of the B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum, told JNS that artwork by Israels “will always be aesthetically relevant and relevant with regard to his Jewish and other subjects and to the ongoing and delightful complication of defining ‘Jewish art.’”

‘Complex tangle’

By age 16, Israels—who grew up studying the Torah and Talmud—was training in Amsterdam with the portrait painter Jan Kruseman.

“He commented on how Rembrandt’s work enveloped him—in particular, Rembrandt’s Jewish beggars—and he was also drawn to the Judenstraat with its gray-bearded Jews, barrels of fish, piles of fruit and its sky,” said Soltes, referring to “Jew Street.”

“Israels carried localized anecdote to universal human statement,” Soltes said. “He lived among the fishing folk of Zandvoort in the late 1850s, where he became more conscious of nature, of the luminescence of the sky reflecting the sea, of the unadorned drama of life that is intimate with severity, sacred and spiritual in its simplicity.”

The artist’s peers praised “Son of the Ancient Race”—“not its Judaism, but its humanity, and yet the subject is clearly Jewish and was recognized at the time as such,” Soltes said. “His 1903 ‘Jewish Wedding’ carries a genre subject into the dappled, sketch-like style of Impressionism that pushes us into the 20th century.”

It is possible that “a specifically Jewish sensibility” propelled Israels toward Impressionism and made him tower over his contemporaries in Holland, and “that the works Israels created would not have been what they became without a Jewish element in his consciousness,” Soltes told JNS. “But we cannot be certain of this.”

But he noted that Rembrandt, who was not Jewish, painted many Jewish subjects, including prominent Jews, a “Jewish bride” and Dutch synagogues, two centuries earlier.

“Would we term such works ‘Jewish’—but only in terms of subject and not in terms of the artist’s identity—and would we term Jewish subjects by Israels more ‘Jewish’ because the artist was a Jew?” Soltes said. “What then of his works for which the subject is not Jewish? He leaves us caught in a complex tangle of definitional threads.”

Great ‘rabbi of painting’

The artist’s connection to Zionism was also complicated, as Gilya Gerda Schmidt, professor emerita of religious studies and director emerita of the Judaic studies program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, wrote in a chapter devoted to Israels in her 2003 book, The Art and Artists of the Fifth Zionist Congress, 1901.

Six of Israels’ works were included in the exhibition, which Martin Buber organized, at the 1901 congress in Basel, Switzerland.

In a chapter devoted to Israels, Gerda Schmidt variously refers to the artist as the “great ‘rabbi’ of painting,” the “Altmeister of Dutch art” (old master) and “the Jewish Rembrandt.”

In 1898, Theodor Herzl visited Israels and tried to interest him in the Zionist movement, according to the book. However, according to some scholars, a Zionist publication that stated that Israels had contributed financially to the cause had to issue a correction.

Gerda Schmidt records a memory of Israels’ during a visit to Tangiers in Morocco, during which he entered a home on a whim.

After climbing a staircase, the then septuagenarian artist saw a curtain moving back and forth and froze “indecisively and in thought,” fearing that if he entered a room, he wouldn’t know what would happen next.

“I heard, to my great surprise, a voice ask in Hebrew, ‘Mamevakeshecha?’ (What do you want?),” Israels said. “I entered and said, ‘Shalom Adoni, shalom aleichem. Anochi Yehudi mi eretz Hollandi’ (Hello sir, I am a Jew from Holland).”

Entering the dark room, Israels saw a “long table with crooked legs,” upon which lay a long piece of parchment that hung over both edges. “Behind the table sat the Torah scribe, with both arms on the parchment, and turned his regal countenance towards me,” Israels recalled.

“The head seemed much too large for the body that was hidden behind the long table,” he added. “It was a magnificent face, fine and transparent, pale like alabaster; wrinkles, small and large, surrounded his small eyes and his large, crooked hawk’s nose.”

That sofer, with his “black cap” and “large, yellowish-white beard” that flowed over the parchment, inspired one of Israels’s great paintings, “Jewish Scribe” (1902), in the collection of the Kröller-MĂŒller Museum in Otterlo in the Netherlands.

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The cancellation at Brooklyn’s Kingsborough Community College came following years of outspoken pro-Palestinian advocacy across the CUNY system that has ramped up since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, along with longstanding allegations by Jewish groups that its administrators do not do enough to protect Jewish students. And they occurred shortly before a group of pro-Palestinian activists staged an hours-long occupation of a CUNY building in Manhattan, even as the wave of pro-Palestinian encampments at other schools is dying down.

“We felt saddened and dismayed that the college canceled our Yom Hazikaron event instead of providing security to protect us from threats,” Kingsborough Hillel’s faculty adviser, Susan Aranoff, a business professor, told the New York Jewish Week, using the Hebrew name for Israel’s Memorial Day. “The college must protect freedom of expression for all.”

The Hillel at Baruch College, another branch of CUNY, also said its event for Israel’s Independence Day had been canceled. The school told the New York Jewish Week it had offered alternative locations for that event, but Hillel declined to accept them. Queens College’s Hillel, meanwhile, did host Memorial and Independence Day events without incident.

A CUNY spokesperson said the university system is “committed to ensuring that every student and faculty or staff member is safe from violence, intimidation and harassment.”

“We also reaffirm that everyone in our community has a constitutional right to free speech. CUNY is working with campus leaders to ensure all our community members are protected during school events,” the spokesperson said.

Kingsborough Hillel, which serves about 30 to 40 students at the college in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn, had planned a Zoom event with a former Israeli soldier and cybersecurity expert. The students attending the event were set to gather in-person on campus, where they planned to hold a memorial service and light a candle.

Ahead of the event, anti-Israel protest groups issued a call to rally next to the campus on Oriental Boulevard, circulating a graphic that said, “Students and workers say no to rehabilitating the image of war criminals.”

Kingsborough’s Hillel asked the administration for upgraded security due to the protest. Instead, the administration opted to cancel the event hours before it was supposed to start, the college’s Hillel told the New York Jewish Week.

A Kingsborough spokesperson confirmed the event had been canceled due to protests “out of an abundance of caution to ensure safety and appropriate access to campus for our students, faculty, and staff.”

A number of faculty asked the administration to reverse the decision to no avail, Hillel said. Jeff Lax, a Kingsborough business professor and outspoken advocate for Zionist students, said he requested a meeting and waited outside the office of University President Suri Duitch for 20 minutes while she was inside, but said she did not come out to speak with him.

The pro-Palestinian protest still took place, drawing around 30 people who waved Palestinian flags and, according to a video by Lax, chanted, “Resistance is justified when people are occupied.”

The protesters declared “victory” after the event.

“The shameful event allowing a former high-ranking IOF soldier on campus, hosted by Kingsborough Community College and Hillel, has been SHUT DOWN!” a student pro-Palestinian group posted on social media, using a derisive abbreviation for Israel’s military that stands for Israel Occupation Force. “Power to CUNY students and workers! Free Palestine!”

The next day, on Tuesday, Kingsborough Hillel was scheduled to hold an Israeli Independence Day event on an outdoor terrace on campus, but the college ordered organizers to move the event indoors. A photo from the scene showed nine security guards stationed outside the door.

Meanwhile, at Baruch, the campus Hillel said on Instagram last week that the college had ordered the club’s Yom Haatzmaut, or Independence Day, event on May 2 “canceled” due to security concerns.

Baruch College told the New York Jewish Week that Hillel had been offered other locations for the event.

“The safety of our students remains our top priority,” the college said in a statement. “Regarding the Yom Ha’atzmaut celebration, Hillel was offered two alternative spaces on campus. They declined the opportunity to hold the event in these alternative locations, choosing to cancel instead.”

Baruch Hillel did not respond to a request for comment, but posted on Instagram that the school is “sending a strong message to Jewish students that they cannot adequately protect Jewish students, while the protestors spew hateful and intimidating language in our public spaces without any repercussions.”

The post added, “Baruch College is silencing the voice of the Jewish students and their ability to celebrate their Jewish identity proudly and openly.”

In the same Instagram post, the Hillel also uploaded video showing protesters chanting, “Baruch Hillel you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.”

Across the city, Queens College’s Hillel held a Memorial Day event on campus on Tuesday and an “Israelfest” event on Wednesday to celebrate Israel’s Independence Day.

The college’s Hillel director, Jenna Citron Schwab, said no protesters were visible — a shift from earlier in the academic year, when the school was rocked by anti-Israel protests, and an interfaith meeting between Muslim and Jewish students was marred by inflammatory rhetoric and shouting. In March, vandals scrawled graffiti on campus including swastikas and threats to Jews. Schwab said the atmosphere has since improved.

“Every campus has its challenges,” she said. “Right now, we’re working closely with the administration to tackle the challenges that we’re seeing.”

Separately, on Tuesday night, anti-Israel protesters took over the CUNY Graduate Center, in the first protest of its kind at the Manhattan university. According to video distributed by protest groups on the Telegram messaging app, the protesters occupied the center’s lobby, chanting the slogan, “Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest,” which has become popular at student pro-Palestinian protests.

The demonstrators pasted signs onto an adjacent library, renaming it the “Al Aqsa University Library” after the Muslim holy site adjacent to the Western Wall and atop the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site. The mosque has been a flashpoint for conflict and is the namesake of Hamas’ title for its Oct. 7 invasion of Israel, which it dubbed the “Al Aqsa Flood.”

Minutes after the CUNY demonstrators announced their rally at the Graduate Center, the protest group Within Our Lifetime, which endorsed the Oct. 7 attack, sent out a statement urging its followers to “Flood CUNY for Gaza.”

At 10:20 p.m., the Graduate Center’s interim president, Josh Brumberg, sent out an email to the campus community stating that he had emailed CUNY Chancellor FĂ©lix Matos RodrĂ­guez about the protest, according to a copy of the email shared with the New York Jewish Week.

Brumberg said protesters’ demands included a meeting with Rodríguez, amnesty for other CUNY protesters, divestment from companies “complicit in the imperialist-zionist genocide,” and cutting all ties with Israeli academic institutions.

Brumberg also said he had agreed to not discipline any of the demonstrators. Two weeks ago, more than 100 people were arrested when the NYPD cleared out an encampment at the City College of New York, another CUNY branch.

The protest at the Graduate Center dissolved that night, according to a statement from the school.

“After several hours of discussion, an amicable resolution was reached and the demonstrators left peacefully,” the statement said. “The Graduate Center is committed to ensuring first amendment rights and freedom of expression while maintaining University policies to safeguard students’ right to an education and protect our community from harassment, discrimination, and vandalism.”

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Ohayon is one of six volunteers in Hashomer HaChadash’s “Alexander Zaid” youth leadership program, who pitched the project to rehabilitate the kibbutz’s green areas following Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre and got the authorization from the Israeli military to do so.

“After a day in Kfar Aza, I often feel emotional and humbled to have the opportunity to be part of the rebuilding,” fellow volunteer Oshrat Hollander, 18, from Beit Hashmonai, told JNS.

“I feel satisfied to be working the land, especially in a place that went through such a horrific disaster and that needs it so much. I feel complete,” she said.

Since Oct. 7, HaShomer HaChadash, a volunteer organization founded in 2007 that works to safeguard the land and farms of Israel, has recruited more than 250,000 volunteers.

“Understanding why we’re here, where we came from and what our future is in the Land of Israel is key in maintaining the land and the existence of the Jewish people in Israel,” said Uri Sapir, the organization’s chief operating officer.

“Our mission is to connect the hearts of the people of Israel and the Diaspora to the Land of Israel and actually do things for the land,” he added.

The Alexander Zaid youth leadership program currently includes 80 young people, boys and girls, religious and secular, who volunteer all over the country in the aftermath of Oct. 7.

“Leadership is not telling other people what to do. It’s demonstrating to the society what they should do. As part of the Alexander Zaid youth leadership program, high school students from all over Israel meet every few weeks to volunteer with farmers,” said Sapir.

“This program gives them a platform to travel the country, learn and become informed leaders and the figures of true Zionism and proactivity,” he continued.

As part of the Kfar Aza forest initiative, which was launched in March, 30 young people have taken part in rebuilding the forest, which includes a garden and playground for children.

Kfar Aza was the scene of some of Hamas’s worst atrocities on Oct. 7. Sixty-two members of the kibbutz were murdered; Alon Shamriz, 26, and Yotam Haim, 28, were kidnapped into Gaza, managed to escape from their Hamas captors and were mistakenly killed by Israeli forces in December, along with Samer Fouad Talalka, 22, who was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Am.

Only six of the kibbutz’s residents have returned to live full-time in Kfar Aza following Hamas’s terror assault, while hundreds remain displaced throughout Israel.

“On Passover, we brought wine and chocolate to show our support and raised our glasses to life. If we can do this, I believe there will be a bright future for the Jewish people in the north and in the south of Israel. We will do everything to make it happen together with the residents of the kibbutzim,” said Ruth Gabriely, 28, from Kibbutz Shomria, who oversees the project.

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After some deliberation, Richard Binstock, a British-Israeli from Rishon Lezion, decided to attend a rooftop party in Tel Aviv but noted that the roads into the coastal metropolis were unusually empty. “I’m sad to say there’s no traffic,” he said. “It’s been one of my quickest journeys ever.”

Nicole Barrs from Kiryat Ono said she had declined an invitation to a party. “I didn’t feel like going out to celebrate so I’m with family, having a small gathering,” she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Nataly Peleg from Tel Aviv said she was staying indoors this year because she was “in no mood to go out at all. I just can’t do it this year.”

Worshipers at a synagogue in south Tel Aviv voiced similar sentiments. “It’s not a celebration this year,” Itzik Cohen, a leader of the Zichron Baruch synagogue, told JTA. “We don’t want to celebrate it but we have to. I don’t have the privilege of saying, ‘I’m not doing it this year.’ It’s a religious obligation, much like Passover.”

Cohen said the leaders of the synagogue had held several discussions about how to mark the holiday this year. Ultimately, they decided to proceed with the synagogue’s annual plans for a communal prayer followed by festivities, albeit a more toned-down version without bringing the music and dancing outside to the street as in previous years.

“It’s hard to admit this but I’m not feeling anything. I’m emotionally disconnected,” Yasmin Ishbi, who is not religiously observant but who brought her children to the synagogue’s event, told JTA. “Some people like living the ups and the downs in deep ways. I prefer not to feel the ups so that way I don’t have to feel the downs.”

According to Moshiko Balas, a municipality director, major celebrations all over Tel Aviv, including two major events that between them attract nearly 20,000 attendees, were canceled this year in light of the war. Even silent fireworks shows — which last year replaced the city’s traditional fireworks extravaganza out of deference to military veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder — were scrapped. The country also axed a traditional nationwide Independence Day flyover of military planes.

“Nobody is in the mood to celebrate,” Balas told JTA. But he added, “Having said that, we knew that even if we’re not celebrating Independence Day, we still have to mark it.”

To that end, the municipality conducted a poll in the city of Jaffa to gauge how people wanted to mark Independence Day this year. Fifty percent of those polled said they did not want to attend the large event that was planned and that included a concert by Israeli pop star Zahava Ben. The event, held in Davidoff Park in Jaffa, was modified and Ben’s appearance was nixed.

Instead, a small, unknown band took to the stage as did several representatives from local security and medical authorities, who were honored for their roles in the war. Balas noted that young singles and older people were noticeably absent from this year’s event and that several people had raised concerns about the possibility of rocket sirens, which also affected turnout. In the end, about 1,000 people showed up — half of last year’s crowd. Most were families with small children.

“Ultimately, people wanted it to be kids-oriented, to have a more community and unifying feel that was more intimate,” Balas said.

Doron Sabah, a teacher, said that he had “cried a whole lot” during the Memorial Day ceremony at his school earlier in the day.

“After that, my kids wanted to go buy Israeli flags and stuff but it felt weird. And friends invited us to a concert, but that also felt weird so we didn’t go. So we’re here,” he said. Referencing the war and the political turmoil reemerging in the country, Sabah went on, “The depressing thing about all this is that there seems to be no end in sight, like how do we get out of this mess?”

Maor Damasia said it was “hard not to feel guilty” about the families of victims of Oct. 7. “They can’t celebrate because they’re in mourning or because they have loved ones in Gaza. But I guess, everyone is affected in this war. Please God, next year we’ll be in a different time and it will be happier.”

Around 100,000 people gathered at an Independence Day rally in Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square to hear speeches from survivors of Oct. 7 as well as those with family members still  held hostage by Hamas in Gaza.

Another alternative Independence Day ceremony under the banner “no hostages, no independence” was held in the coastal Israeli town of Binyamina. Organized by Noam Dan, whose cousin Ofer Kalderon is a hostage in Gaza, the ceremony included extinguishing torches, conveying a somber counterpoint to the official state ceremony in Jerusalem in which torches are lit.

In a controversial move, the government-organized torch lighting ceremony was pre-recorded on Wednesday, without an audience. This year’s torch lighters include soldiers, medical personnel and civilians who saved lives on Oct. 7. One of the honorees is Youssef Ziadna, a Bedouin Arab who saved 30 people from the Nova music festival massacre.

“It was very very emotional. I can’t believe I was privileged for such a thing to happen to me. I’m very proud,” a teary-eyed Ziadna told JTA. “I’m thankful to the state for choosing me to light an Independence Day torch. We’re one people, Arabs and Jews, and please God we’ll live in peace and quiet in our country soon.”

At the synagogue in South Tel Aviv, Anne Dubitzky said that this year, the celebrations were largely in deference to Israel’s children. “If we don’t celebrate Yom Haatzmaut, then our enemies have won. And if the kids don’t celebrate, they won’t have the basis for loving and eventually defending the country,” she said, using the Hebrew name for Independence Day.

For radio personality Omer Ben Rubin, it was also all about the kids, who often also take center stage during normal years, playing with toy hammers and silly string.

“It’s just like on Oct. 8, we felt we needed to just get on with it for the kids. Is it natural to be celebrating? Of course not,” he said. “But you know what they say, happiness is infectious. So maybe our kids’ happiness will infect us also, you know? If it wasn’t for them, we’d all be in bed with the covers pulled over our heads.”

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Under the open sky on a temperate spring night, thousands of participants from around the world had gathered in the fields of the Ayalon Valley that date back to the biblical battles of Joshua and then the modern-day State of Israel’s 1948 War of Independence in remembrance of the fallen Israeli soldiers and the victims of terror.

Huge banners hung on the stage with the words “We are one”—this year’s theme of the country’s largest English-language Yom Hazikaron ceremony, which was organized by the Masa Israel Journey and held in the backdrop of the seven-month-old war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip and an uptick in antisemitism worldwide making the event especially poignant.

The 90-minute ceremony, which, like hundreds of others across Israel, got underway following the national siren that sounded at 8 p.m. and pierced the night air, commemorated new immigrants to Israel from around the world who went through the organization’s educational programs and were killed in the Oc. 7 massacre and other terror attacks, and one who is still being held captive by Hamas in Gaza.

After the Israeli flag was lowered to half-mast by a solider from the ceremonial guard, their stories were shared: rising Sgt. (posthumously) Omer Balava, the American-born combat soldier in the IDF’s Nahal Brigade who fell in battle on the northern border from Hezbollah fire in October; 2nd. Sgt. Rose Lubin, a border police officer who defended a borderline Kibbutz in the Hamas massacre only to be killed in a stabbing attack in eastern Jerusalem in November; and Capt. Denis Krukhamelov-Veksler, a Ukrainian-born combat engineering officer in the Yahalom Unit, Combat Engineering Corps, who fell in combat in Gaza in January at the age of 32.

Amid brief musical interludes, additional stories were told—that of the Peruvian-born doctor, Dr. Daniel Levy, who was killed working to save lives at a border-area kibbutz clinic on Oct. 7; the story of three Dee women gunned down during Passover 2023, and the attack on the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aeries, Argentina, in July 1994 that killed 85 people and wounded more than 300.

“It is precisely at this time that we should feel grateful,” stated Ron Dermer, Israel’s minister for strategic affairs, in remarks during the ceremony. “Today, the Jewish people have the power to fight back. We don’t need to beg others to defend ourselves. We fight back.”

He said that the Jewish world had largely forgotten 20 centuries of massacres and pogroms after half a century when Jew-hatred had largely been pushed underground until the “volcano of Jew-hatred erupted” with the attack of Oct. 7.

“Jew-hatred is reverting back to its pre-Holocaust norms,” he said. “The post-Holocaust period was the exception.”

“This year, Israelis and Jews around the world feel that we are part of a greater story,” said Masa acting CEO Yael Sahar Rubinstein. “This year has been especially hard, but the comfort is we are all here together.”

She said to the sea of participants: “Our source of unity has been proven: We are one. United we will not falter. United we will prevail.”

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The shutdown, which Turkey’s Islamist-leaning president Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced May 3, is putting pressure on prices in Israel, cutting off a major trade route for kosher food and affecting people on both corners of the eastern Mediterranean.

“For the last two weeks, everything stopped. We can’t do normal business,” Rami Simon, a Turkish Jew who trades aluminum and construction materials to Israel, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

The shutdown is one of the most sweeping steps taken by any country to oppose Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. Erdogan said trade would resume only when there is a permanent ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, the terror group that Erdogan has said he supports.

It also marks a significant breach for countries that have long had close physical and economic ties and, until recently, resilient diplomatic relations despite periods of tension.

In 2023, Turkey was Israel’s fourth-largest trading partner, responsible for billions of dollars of exports to Israel.

As the world’s seventh-largest food producer, Turkey has been the main source of some staples consumed in Israel, including pasta and chocolate. And the countries’ close proximity — it’s about 400 miles by sea between Mersin, southern Turkey’s largest port, and Tel Aviv — made Turkey a go-to source for food and construction materials.

“Given the geographical proximity of Turkey, you could order something and within a couple of days you have it,” explains Hay Eitan Cohen Yanarocak, a Turkish-born Jew and scholar of Turkey-Israel relations at Tel Aviv University. “So that was a huge plus for the Israeli businessman, who preferred to do business with Turkey rather than other more distant destinations.”

To serve the Israeli market, more than 300 kosher-certified factories operate across Turkey. Before the embargo, at any given moment around 20 Israeli mashgichim — kosher certifiers — would be visiting to check on factories across the country, from the Iranian border to the Aegean coast.

That’s all ground to a halt, a source familiar with the Turkish kashrut industry told JTA, and Turkish factory owners and Israeli certification agencies are reconsidering their contracts. The source requested anonymity because of the delicate political situation.

Some kosher foods require oversight only once or twice a year, meaning that current production runs could be salvaged if a ceasefire agreement is reached in the coming months. But others, according to Orthodox Jewish law, require more frequent supervision, if not constant. That includes Pas or Cholov Yisroel goods, which require Jewish supervisors to be present during the entire production runs of bread and dairy products.

Such kosher standards are common in haredi Orthodox communities, and even U.S. kosher supermarkets frequently stock goods produced in Turkey that are exported to the United States from Israel by Israel-based kosher brands. The ban also affects these products.

“Prices are going to rise,” Yanarocak said, noting that in Israel he’s seeing particular concern about the price of tomatoes. Although Israel is famous for its cultivation of tomatoes, it has also imported huge quantities from Turkey — nearly $40 million worth a year in recent years.

Yanarocak said he foresaw more lasting effects, too. “I assume that the [Israeli] government will draw some conclusions from this, that we have to do everything in order to minimize our dependency on other nations, not only Turkey. Therefore, I’m expecting to see an increase in national production,” Yanarocak said.

But crops always wax and wane, and a shortage of tomatoes is a relatively manageable problem for Israel, he said. Other products can’t withstand an interruption in supply, making it likely that Israel will look for more stable suppliers faster.

“It will be very hard for Turkey to come back with such strategic goods mentioned like steel, cement, aluminum, and other construction materials,” Yanarocak said. “Because these products are considered crucial for the country, in the long run, I assume that Turkey will not be able to come back to the Israeli market in the same way, even if we witness a U-turn.”

If an about-face in Erdogan’s stance comes — and some say the signs of one are already showing — it would mark a return to the norm in the history of the two countries’ relations.

Turkey and Israel have long had close economic relations. They also maintained largely positive diplomatic ones for decades while Turkey was under the rule of secularist parties in the 20th century.

Relations have been rockier since Erdogan’s ascendance in the early 2000s, but even at their lowest points — such as after the Mavi Marmara incident in 2010, in which Israel raided a Turkish ship that was attempting to breach Israel’s blockade of Gaza — trade remained high.

On Oct. 6, the day before Hamas terrorists attacked Israel, diplomatic relations were at their highest point in years. Ambassadors had once again been exchanged between the two countries after the rocky period following the Mavi Marmara incident. Erdogan had spoken positively about his calls with Israeli President Isaac Herzog and was even planning a trip to Israel.

Yet soon after the Oct. 7 attack, Erdogan pivoted towards Hamas, calling the group not terrorists but “liberators” and “Mujahideen,” an Islamic term for a holy warrior. Some analysts interpreted his stance as an effort to appeal to conservative voters who have gravitated towards the Islamist New Welfare party, which has loudly accused Erdogan of being too soft in its support of Gaza and the Palestinians.

In March, Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, known locally as AKP, suffered its largest loss in two decades, bleeding voters on the right. It was soon after that Erdogan ramped up his pressure on Israel and announced the trade embargo.

After Israeli officials suggested last week that Turkey may already be softening its stance, Turkey denied that it was easing the embargo but did clarify that there would be a three-month period during which pre-existing contracts could be satisfied.

But Erdogan further strained ties this weekend, when during a meeting with the Greek prime minister he doubled down on his stance that Hamas was not a terror group and declared that over 1,000 Hamas fighters were being treated in Turkish hospitals. He did not explain when or how they arrived in Turkey from Gaza.

Still, there are glimmers of hope that the trade ban could be short-lived. Though formal ambassadors have not been reinstated, low-level Israeli diplomats returned to Ankara this week. It’s the first Israeli diplomatic presence in the Turkish capital since October.

Yanarocak noted that he also sees hope in their counterparts at the Turkish Cultural Center in Tel Aviv, who, despite rhetoric from the top, have continued their work.

Turkey’s Jewish population has been in decline for decades, with spurts of emigration in step with periods of political and economic instability. But between 10,000 and 15,000 Jews live in the country today, most in Istanbul with a smaller community in the Aegean port city of Izmir. Many of those who remain are involved in exports with Israel.

Simon said he and others he knows are looking into other countries to ship their products to, but it’s an industry based on connections, and new markets are hard to break into. He also noted that he supplied buyers in Gaza and Palestinian areas of the West Bank as well and now cannot ship his products to them because Israeli ports are closed to Turks.

Simon also said he’s pinning his hopes on a ceasefire, even though Hamas and Israel have so far failed to reach one. Hamas has not accepted any of the ceasefire deals offered to it, insisting that only a permanent ceasefire would be tolerable. Israel rejects the idea of any ceasefire that leaves Hamas in power in Gaza.

“Hopefully we won’t still be thinking about this in a few months when there will be a ceasefire in Gaza. We are waiting for this,” Simon said about the trade embargo.

“If it’s going to take five or six months we’re going to have a big, big issue and problem,” he added. “After that, if we can still not do business, to export to Israel, I think many people are going to try to look for a different solution for their lives, and maybe ultimately leave Turkey.”

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