New York is home to the largest Jewish community outside Israel. The day of the horrific attack by Hamas is known in the city as 10/7. What shocks many here almost as much as the attack itself: how the world is reacting to it
By Christian Zaschke for Süddeutsche Zeitung
David Ingber points to the bolt. “This is new,” he says. Ingber is the founder and Rabbi of the progressive Romemu Synagogue in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. A few days ago, workmen screwed a shimmering silver bolt to the door in his office so that he can lock the door from the inside. The bolt is intended to allow Ingber to barricade himself in in the event of an attack on the synagogue and is thus a clear sign that a new era has begun for the Jewish community in New York.
Ingber himself chooses these big words. He says: “I believe that in the future we will speak of an Israel before October 7 and one after. And the same applies to Judaism as a whole, including us here in New York. From now on, there will be a before and an after.” In the USA, the day on which Hamas terrorists carried out a massacre of Israeli civilians is called 10/7 because Americans put the month before the day. It’s hard to compare the two events, but when you talk to members of the Jewish community in New York these days, you get the impression that 10/7 could prove even more traumatic for many than 9/11, the day 22 years ago when Islamist terrorists flew two airplanes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. More than 2750 people lost their lives in New York. The city took a long time to recover from this.
More than one and a half million Jews live in New York City, no other city in the world has more people of the Jewish faith. It is the largest Jewish community outside Israel and the most diverse in the world. You can find rabbis like Ingber here, who plays his acoustic guitar in his office to relax or reflect. In times like these, when the world seems to be falling on his head, the guitar is a godsend.
You can find Rabbis like Michelle Dardashti, who has an Iranian background, and Angela Buchdahl, who is originally from South Korea. Or the Israeli-born Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, who can tell an almost classical New York story: He came to the city because he was interested in the multifaceted Jewish life in New York, he didn’t want to stay too long. That was 24 years ago. The story of people who only wanted to visit New York for a short time and then never left is almost as old as the city itself.
After the Hamas attack, Lau-Lavie immediately flew to Israel. On the one hand, he says, because he knew he would be able to help, and on the other because he wanted to hold his mother’s hand.
David Ingber didn’t really think much of the bolt on his office door. Wasn’t that a sign of fear? “And a religious community that lives in permanent fear is doomed,” he says. But after Islamist groups recently called for a global day of jihad, he was persuaded. However, he also knows that the bolt has a rather symbolic function and would offer him little protection in the event of an armed attack. His office door has a window.
The Jewish community in New York is not only diverse, it was also notoriously divided. Many progressives criticized Israel, sometimes harshly, especially in recent months when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government tried to push through a controversial judicial reform. Ingber says that even among the Orthodox there were voices critical of the government in this context, which is rare. The Orthodox are the most visible members of the Jewish community due to their traditional dress, which is why they are most likely to be the victims of attacks. So far, it seems, this has not stopped them from appearing on the streets of New York. Although the murder of a female Rabbi in Detroit a week ago caused unrest in the community, the police have so far not assumed an anti-Semitic background.
Ingber himself comes from an orthodox family. In his younger years, he says, he lost his connection to the faith and became a yoga teacher and a Buddhist. Gradually, however, he found his way back to Jewish culture, he discovered a deep spirituality within himself and became a Rabbi. In fact, his spirituality surrounds him like an electric field, like a cosmic aura. One would not be too surprised if he could play his guitar without touching it.
There is nothing good about the events of October 7, he says, but at least he believes they have brought together the often fractious factions of the Jewish community in New York. “I believe that the community has found a new solidarity here. Of course, there will always be other voices, especially among the far left, but overall the community is coming together.”
This coming together has to do not only with the Hamas attack, but also with the reactions to it. At many elite universities in the US, students have held pro-Palestine demonstrations, including in New York, for example at Berkeley College, Columbia University and New York University. They have disrupted and sometimes attacked rallies in solidarity with Israel. They have torn posters from the walls showing Israeli civilians who have been abducted by Hamas and are being held hostage.
In response, the Israeli-American Council, together with other Jewish organizations, set up an empty Shabbat table with more than 200 seats in the middle of Times Square this Thursday to commemorate the fate of the hostages. On Friday, they set up the same table in Brooklyn.
The protests at the universities usually call for “justice for Palestine” in very general terms, without going into detail about the atrocities committed by Hamas. Sometimes, however, chants could be heard calling for a free Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, which is the barely disguised demand that Israel should disappear from the map.
Ingber says: “It’s as if these cathedrals of knowledge and liberalism have turned against us. It’s a terrible feeling, because if these institutions of the mind don’t understand what has really happened, who will?” He says it´s a wake-up call for many Jews, because they now felt an urgent existential threat again and, above all, shared the feeling of being ultimately alone.
The reactions to the massacre are also what shook Angela Buchdahl almost as much as the massacre itself. She is the Rabbi of the Central Synagogue in Midtown Manhattan and, incidentally, like Ingber, also loves to play the acoustic guitar. Buchdahl heads a congregation that she says is unusual in that it is also very mixed politically. “In many progressive communities, everyone is simply a democrat, which is not the case here”, she says. So the debates in the community are lively. For her, October 7 also represents a turning point because she is experiencing something completely new after the Hamas attack.
“It’s not just a bit of anti-Semitism here and there,” she says, “something bigger is happening, and it’s as dangerous as it is frightening. I’ve never felt in my life that the Jewish community is feeling so vulnerable, so upset, so angry and at the same time scared and isolated.”
For Buchdahl, it is like a terrible awakening. When she attended Yale University in the early 1990s, around 25 percent of her fellow students were Jewish. “It almost felt like almost everyone on campus was Jewish, at least it was completely normal to be Jewish.” In 2000, the politician Joe Liebermann ran for Vice President of the USA, the first Jew to do so. “Jews were so visible,” she says, “and I really thought the time of anti-Semitism was over.” Now, however, some Jewish students are afraid to go to their campus. “This is happening in the USA of 2023,” says Buchdahl, “and you have to ask: What is happening here right now?”
Like David Ingber, she also senses a new cohesion in the New York community. In the weeks since October 7, the Central Synagogue has always been full for Shabbat – 1,200 people. Thousands of members tune in to the livestream. Buchdahl says that some relatives of kidnapped Israelis were recently in the synagogue, and that people even came from distant communities on Long Island and in Westchester to express their sympathy and solidarity and to mourn and pray together.
Watching Buchdahl’s sermons, one experiences a Rabbi who is eloquent, empathetic, warm-hearted and often highly critical of Israel’s government. “I am not someone who blindly and uncritically defends Israel,” she says, “I am for the rights of the Palestinians, you could even say I am pro-Palestine. I by no means deny that the Palestinians have experienced oppression and injustice. But that does not justify slaughtering innocent people. Nor does it justify portraying these terrorists as freedom fighters.”
Around half of New York’s Jews live in Brooklyn. The oldest synagogue there is the comparatively small Kane Street Synagogue, where Michelle Dardashti has been the rabbi since August 2022. She says that one hundred new families have joined the congregation in the past year, which is a considerable growth given that there are now 380 families.
However, Dardashti says that it should by no means be portrayed as if she alone is responsible for the growth, because she doesn’t want to come across as a show-off. Instead of “show-off”, she uses the excellent Yiddish word shvitzer, which not only describes someone who sweats profusely, but also someone who sings their praises a little too fervently. The truth is, however, that the increase is probably mainly due to Dardashti, because she fills the whole place with her charisma.
She compares the massacre and its aftermath to a massive flood that has not only washed away many lives, but could change the entire Middle East. “We American Jews are currently on an ark, so to speak,” she says, “and we don’t know how long the flood will last and what awaits us when it’s over. The only certainty is that it will change us massively.”
When Islamists recently called for the Day of Jihad, which resulted in a deadbolt now being placed on David Inger’s office door, she considered closing the preschool at the synagogue. She decided against it because fear cannot be a solution. But her children’s school, just ten minutes away, remained closed that day. Her husband, who wears a kippah, did not go to work that day. “His boss had told him it might be better if he didn’t come,” says Dardashti. Out of caution.
In the many conversations she has in her community, the tenor is that no one knows what to do next. “There are a few people who want a ceasefire and others who are in favor of the toughest possible approach, but for the vast majority, the main thing is helplessness in the face of horror.”
She talks about Rabbi Nachman, who taught in Eastern Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He compared life to walking on a narrow bridge. For Dardashti, in relation to the current situation, this means that the Jewish community in New York should neither completely assimilate and become invisible out of fear, nor should it circle the wagons and trust no one. “I believe it is now our task as a community to find our way forward on this narrow bridge,” she says.
The image of the narrow bridge can also be used to describe the work of New York Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie. In the past, he has often criticized Israel sharply, sometimes angrily. He has just as often expressed his infinite love for the country. He has always walked this thin red line with confidence. This may be one of the reasons why the New York weekly newspaper The Jewish Week described him as one of the most interesting thinkers in the Jewish world.
After the attack, he didn’t hesitate for a second to fly from New York to Israel. “My father survived the Holocaust,” he says on the phone in Jerusalem, “he was an Israeli diplomat and politician and died nine years ago. I learned from him what it means to serve a nation. And from my mother, who is a social worker, I learned how to contribute to society with my whole heart.”
In concrete terms, this means that he gives comfort, that he talks to relatives of the dead and the abducted, and that he mediates. Lau-Lavie is currently walking what is probably the narrowest bridge of all, because he is bringing Palestinians and Israelis together. “I have come to tell everyone that I am with them, that they are not alone. This also applies to my Palestinian friends.”
As a man of balance, he finds some reactions to the horror disappointing. “Where are the friends in New York?” he asks, “where are the allies? Where are the people in this city who say it’s complicated, we know this, but what can we do, how can we help? I wish people had more emotional intelligence in dealing with a crisis like this instead of acting in a way that hurts others.”
Like David Ingber, like Angela Buchdahl, like Michelle Dardashti, he is also driven by the question of all questions: How can things continue in the long run? “At the moment, we don’t have a far-sighted leadership in Israel that can lead us to a safer world”, says Lau-Lavie, “we need to think strategically and diplomatically five steps ahead, ten steps. How can we build friendships that prevent another war? This is not a question that we can answer quickly in the current situation, but I can say on behalf of many of my Palestinian and many of my Israeli friends that this is exactly what we need to work on.”
David Ingber is skeptical as to whether the conflict can ever be resolved. He says: “Many members of the Jewish community here have the impression, given the unbelievable brutality of the attack and the endless hatred, that no matter what we do, they still want to kill us.” Nevertheless, he also realizes that there must be a solution, and that this can only consist of some form of reconciliation. Until he comes to some kind of answer while pondering this existential question, he is likely to play many more songs on his guitar.
“Perhaps we have believed for too long that we don’t have to solve this conflict,” says Michelle Dardashti, “just as climate change deniers believe that nothing bad will happen to them. Perhaps we have been hiding under a kind of protective shield instead of facing reality. Now the worst has happened, and it’s clear that we need to find a solution.”
Angela Buchdahl draws a line to the Holocaust. She says: “What happened back then under the Nazis was so incomprehensibly terrible that for a while there was no more anti-Semitism in many parts of the Western world afterwards. At least no one spoke out publicly about it. Now, however, most of the survivors are dead or very, very old, and perhaps this means that the inoculation is running out, so to speak. That the cancer of anti-Semitism is growing again.”
Buchdahl pauses and realizes that this would be an overly gloomy conclusion. She thinks about it. Then she says: “A trauma only becomes really bad when you subsequently lose the fundamental convictions on which you base your life. As a Jew, as a Rabbi and as a human being, I still believe that people are fundamentally good. And I still believe, despite everything, that the world is fundamentally a good place, a safe place, and that it has an order.”
It is easy to imagine her gently accompanying these words on the acoustic guitar during a sermon at the Central Synagogue in midtown Manhattan.
