Rabbi Or Zohar was serving as the spiritual leader of a Reform congregation in the Galilee, already his third pulpit position in Israel, when he began seriously contemplating relocation.

"It's very hard being a Reform rabbi in Israel, and it's very tiring," he says. "You have to do your own fundraising, and there are very few opportunities for moving up the ladder. I was already in my mid-40s and felt that my heyday was behind me, that if I wanted a better job, or a better place to be a rabbi, I needed to think about moving to America."

Since both he and his wife hold U.S. citizenship, there was one less obstacle to overcome. What eventually sent them packing, he says, was the rise to power of the most right-wing, fundamentalist government in Israeli history, followed by the war in Gaza.

"The toxic political environment, and the idea that Israel is changing — and that my values and lifestyle are not respected or supported by the powers that be — made me think, 'Ok, I have other options,'" recalls Zohar. "And so, I started interviewing for jobs, and in the middle of the process, October 7th happened, and that is what did it for us."

Last July, Zohar and his wife moved to Rochester, New York, where he serves as senior rabbi at Temple Sinai, a medium-sized congregation that serves 520 families.

Nava and Yerach Meiersdorf are both graduates of the Schechter Rabbinical Seminary in Israel, which is affiliated with the Conservative movement. She had served as the rabbi of a non-denominational, alternative congregation in Jerusalem, while he was employed as a rabbi for Marom, the young adult branch of the world Conservative/Masorti movement.

Last July, along with their two little children, they picked themselves up and left Israel for jobs in Canada. Both Nava and Yerach were hired as associate rabbis at Adath Israel, a large Conservative congregation that serves roughly 1,500 families in Toronto. In their case, the motivation was primarily economic.

"Many rabbis we know in Israel have spouses who are the main breadwinners, which allows them to get by, but that wasn't the case with us," says Nava. "Salaries for Conservative rabbis in Israel are really low, and we couldn't make ends meets. Because we don't drive on Shabbat, we needed to live in the center of Jerusalem near our congregation, which is not cheap, and my mom would end up helping us every month with the rent."

The Meiersdorf couple and Zohar are among growing numbers of non-Orthodox rabbis trained in Israel who are finding gainful employment in their professions abroad, mainly in North America. The absolute numbers are not very big, but considering that such "exports" were virtually non-existent until about a decade ago, the trend is noteworthy.

"With us, only a few rabbis have left, but since this really never happened before, people are talking about it and are concerned about it," says Rabbi Chaya Rowen Baker, dean of the Schechter Rabbinical Seminary. "People felt a kind of pinch when they left."

Low salaries and a dearth of employment opportunities are among the factors pushing many of these Israeli-trained rabbis abroad. But as Baker notes, there is also the pull of the U.S. market where qualified rabbis are in high demand, as rabbinical schools struggle to recruit new students.

"U.S. synagogues are looking for rabbis, and the positions they can offer are economically more attractive to Israeli rabbis than the positions they would get here," she says. "It's definitely tempting when a synagogue there offers you a salary that's maybe two or three times what you might be making here."

And as Talia Avnon-Benveniste, director of the rabbinical program at the Reform movement's Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem, notes, Israel has a surplus of rabbis. "Right now, we have far more qualified rabbis than jobs available for them."

Israeli-trained rabbis who struggle to find employment at home are, therefore, discovering that they can often pick and choose among offers abroad. Zohar, for example, interviewed at seven different congregations before settling on Rochester. And there is no comparison, he says, between the conditions that are offered in Israel and America.

"My office here, just the office, is larger than some Reform synagogues in Israel," he says. "And here, I have also an entire team to work with — a cantor, an educator, a board. It's not just me by myself doing everything."

The Meiersdorfs also had, according to Nava, "a lot of options."

"And we thought about it very carefully before deciding on Toronto," she says.

An interesting adventure

But it is not only better salaries and terms that are luring Israeli-trained non-Orthodox rabbis away from the Holy Land. Many are also fed up with ongoing attempts in Israel to delegitimize progressive forms of Judaism. Indeed, the Conservative and Reform movements have long suffered from discrimination in government funding, and conversions performed by their rabbis are still not recognized for the purpose of marriage. Under the current government that is dominated by Orthodox parties, the situation has only worsened.

That might explain why it is specifically non-Orthodox rabbis who are leaving. "If anything, among Orthodox rabbis, the move is in the opposite direction," says Avnon-Benveniste. "There are more of them moving here from there."

Out of 136 graduates of HUC in Jerusalem, 27 are currently serving in Jewish communities abroad, 10 of them in North America. The others are spread out around Australia, New Zealand, Britain, South Africa, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Russia, Poland, Spain, Portugal, Brazil and Argentina. Out of 115 Schechter graduates, three have left Israel in the past five years, all of them to congregations in North America.

Gila Caine, who received her ordination from HUC in Jerusalem, serves as rabbi of Temple Beth Ora in Edmonton, Alberta — a relatively small Reform congregation that serves about 100 families.

"I saw they were searching for a rabbi, and my husband and I thought it would be interesting to be part of a Jewish community outside Israel, to give our kids that experience, and to experience non-Israeli Judaism," she says. "We thought it could be an interesting adventure."

So interesting, in fact, that they're still there eight years later.

"I've suddenly started understanding what it means to be a Jew," says Caine, reflecting on the experience. "And it's added a whole new dimension to my Jewishness."

Lior Nevo, who grew up in the Reform movement in Jerusalem and was ordained at HUC, never worked in Israel as a rabbi. After her husband's job brought them to the Boston area, she says, "I stumbled on chaplaincy almost by chance."

For the past six years, she has worked as a chaplain at a senior living facility founded by a Jewish organization that today has only a very small number of Jewish residents. "I've fallen in love with chaplaincy work," she says. "Since most of the residents here are not Jewish, and Israel is very much in the news, I've become a big source of information for them on everything happening in Israel," she says. "It's very meaningful for them — and for me."

Born in the United States, Leora Londy immigrated to Israel when she was 18 and held various congregational positions before becoming officially ordained at HUC three years ago. "Being a rabbi in Israel is wonderful but not lucrative," she says.

While on a trip to New York two summers ago, she by chance met a rabbi who asked whether she might be interested in a pulpit position in America. She received not only one, but two job offers during that short trip.

"We decided we would try living outside Israel for a few years," she says.

Londy, her husband and three children now reside in Chappaqua, New York, where she serves as assistant rabbi at Temple Beth El of Northern Westchester.

Rabbi Lana Zilberman Soloway also assumed her U.S. post in the summer of 2023, but on the complete opposite side of the country. She, too, had never actively pursued employment opportunities outside Israel. An immigrant from the former Soviet Union, she worked for many years as a tour educator before being ordained by the Reform movement. It was through this work that she established a relationship with Congregation Or Ami in California's San Fernando Valley: Every year, over the course of nearly a decade, she led their missions to Israel and Europe.

"They invited me twice to come as their scholar-in-residence, and after that, they had an opening for a rabbi, and they invited me to apply," recounts Zilberman Soloway, who previously worked in Israel for Rabbis for Human Rights. "At first, I didn't think it was something I'd be interested in doing, but I was kind of at a crossroad in where I was in Israel at the time and decided to embark on it as a family adventure."

Today, she serves as second rabbi and director of education at the Southern California congregation. Among the advantages of this position for a working mom like herself is that she is not required to be in charge of everything. "Most congregations in Israel are looking for a solo rabbi because they can't afford more than that, but as a mother of three children, I wasn't seeking a pulpit position, which can be very demanding," says Zilberman Soloway.

'Less honor and dignity'

The vacuum being filled by Israeli-trained rabbis today is the result of the sharply declining number of students attending rabbinical school in America. Andrew Rehfeld, the president of HUC, believes that problem is here to stay.

"I would like our numbers to be up, but the days when we had 130, 140, and 150 rabbis coming through the liberal seminaries every year, I don't think those days are coming back — not in our lifetime," he says.

Among the factors behind the dwindling number of rabbinical students, he lists the fact that liberal Jewish families are having fewer children, making it more difficult to sustain their youth movements, which have long served as a pipeline for rabbinical school.

Rabbi David Ariel-Joel was among the first Reform rabbis trained in Israel to move to the United States. He and his wife arrived in Louisville, Kentucky, nearly 25 years ago for what was supposed to be a three-year stint at Congregation Adath Israel Brith Sholom. They never left.

Ariel-Joel says that given his personal experience, he cannot understand why there is such a shortage of rabbis in America.

"I love my job. I think it's the best job possible, the pay is fine and more than fine, and you get a lot of fulfilment from being a rabbi, so I highly recommend it," he says. "But it feels that maybe there's less honor and dignity in being a rabbi today than there used to be. A Jewish mother would once have been proud for her child to become a rabbi, but maybe not so much anymore."

Zohar, the new rabbi at the Reform congregation in Rochester, suspects [that] the problem is related to the high demands of the rabbinate.

"It's a lifestyle, it's not a job," he says. "It's a big commitment, it doesn't leave you lots of free time, so it's not for everyone. And just like you see foreigners replacing Americans at jobs in restaurants and other services that are very demanding, we're seeing Israelis replace Americans in rabbinical jobs."

Besides that, he notes, established synagogue life in America isn't what it used to be. "Whether you want to admit it or not, it's a world in decline, so many people ask themselves, 'Why go there?'"

In demand

Israeli rabbis who have made the move are discovering they can offer American congregations benefits their American counterparts often cannot. Londy, for example, says that after October 7, her New York congregants, like Jews across America, felt that their lives had been upended. "I couldn't have realized how important my presence would be in helping them navigate their relationship with Israel," she says.

Caine was surprised to learn her congregants had such a passion for Hebrew, her native tongue. "It used to be that there was a lot of English and just a little Hebrew in our prayer service," she says. "Now, there's a lot of Hebrew and just a little English. And what was fascinating to me is that it made my congregants, especially the younger ones, much happier. They feel it's more rooted, more Jewish, when they're praying in Hebrew."

For the first time in their lives, these rabbis say, they also have the luxury of just doing their job.

"I came here with a lot of gusto, having fought for a lot of years to be a legitimate female rabbi in Israel," says Londy. "I'm able to do a lot of pastoral and rabbinic work here that I couldn't get to the bottom of in Israel because so much of my time there was devoted to creating legitimacy for egalitarian Judaism."

"One of the reasons it's so nice to have a pulpit here," she adds, "is that I just get to be a rabbi without having to prove I'm a rabbi."

In Israel, Nava Meiersdorf notes, she and her husband are not even recognized as a married couple because a Conservative rabbi officiated at their wedding. "In Toronto, not only do they recognize marriages performed by Conservative rabbis, but I get to officiate at them, and it's all legal. I don't need to fight here for the Judaism I believe in."

The Meiersdorfs are giving themselves three years in Toronto. "It's very significant for us to say this is short term," says Nava. Her husband sounds somewhat less certain. "Our home is always Israel, but we really don't know what will be," says Yerach.

For Zilberman Soloway, this is also a short-term stint. "Originally, we wanted to come for a year, the community wanted us for three years, which is the standard contract, and we compromised on two." But other transplants say it is too soon to know what the future will bring and seem to be leaning toward a more permanent move.

As an Israeli who has no intention of going back, Ariel-Joel is not convinced that America's lack of homegrown rabbis can be solved by importing more of his kind. "I think the rabbinical schools simply have to do a better job of recruiting students," he says.

Nachman Shai, the dean of HUC in Jerusalem, says [that] he is happy to keep filling the gaps. "I believe the very fact that our rabbis are finding employment in congregations outside Israel is a big compliment to what we are doing here," he says.

"Our rabbis wouldn't get chosen if they weren't a good fit, and if there's a demand for Israeli-trained rabbis outside Israel, to me, that's a sign that our standards are very high."

When October 7th happened, I was filled with rage toward Hamas. Like many, I watched the footage of brutalities, and when the IDF entered Gaza, I cheered them on. Over time, the suffering of innocent Gazans began to bother me—but not as much as it should have. I had become desensitized, like so many other Zionists.

But over time, the images from Gaza started to haunt me. The turning point came with the revelations about Sde Teiman.

In May, CNN published an expose detailing abuses at Sde Teiman, followed by a New York Times report confirming these claims. Both drew on Israeli and Palestinian sources. At first, I dismissed them because Israeli media and my government denied everything. For years, I believed the international media was biased against Israel—that they were antisemitic. But slowly, I realized how deeply I had been lied to. Not just by outsiders, but by my own country, my friends, and my media.

Many who initially denied these allegations later admitted they were true. The worst part? These truths didn’t come out because the IDF or government had a change of heart. They surfaced only because pressure from the UK, the International Criminal Court, and the International Court of Justice became too great. Netanyahu, Gallant, and the Chief of Staff faced serious legal jeopardy, so they finally admitted the truth: Israel routinely tortures detainees, sexual abuse is common, some prisoners die from torture, and many jailed were innocent—rounded up by mistake and thrown into hell without any real verification.

This cannot continue.

From that point, I began looking more critically at what Israel was doing. It pains me to say it, but I had to confront the fact that my country, my friends, and my family were part of a genocide. Early in the war, I insisted that accusations of genocide were blood libel, spread in bad faith. I was right about some actors, but wrong in my overall judgment.

The seeds of genocide had been sown long ago, nurtured by a Zionism that I now understood had been deeply flawed from the start.

I had always sensed something was wrong with Zionism—that beneath the promise of a safe Jewish homeland lay a dangerous exclusivity. The ideology, as it hardened, increasingly dehumanized Palestinians. It denied their humanity and justified their displacement and suffering.

Several moments pushed me to face this truth. I realized Netanyahu wasn’t running the war to defeat Hamas but to escalate violence. The Sde Teiman revelations exposed official lies and cruelty. The slaughter of paramedics and the cover-up shattered my trust. Then came the campaign to bomb every hospital in Gaza, the destruction of water sources, and the sniper shootings of children. The full picture was undeniable.

Zionism began as a movement for survival and self-determination, [Not really. — Anbol] but over time it morphed into a project that demanded ethnic exclusivity and supremacy. This exclusivity bred fear, hatred, and denial of the other’s humanity.

That denial made it easier to justify systematic torture, displacement, and now, genocide.

This descent was slow but steady—a tragedy born of fear, denial, and the erasure of Palestinian humanity.

I had understood this all along, in a way. But I was silent, desensitized, caught between loyalty and truth.

Now, I cannot stay silent anymore.

I was reluctant to share this piece because of the author’s both-sidesing and his oversimplification of Zionism’s origins… but understanding how he left Zionism is useful, and I feel like he would be easy to further reeducate, so I don’t feel too comfortable simply forgetting about him either.

I should you warn you that this story (which mentions rape and self-harm) is depressing to read.

It happened during lights-out. Racheli’s homeroom teacher entered her dormitory room and saw the teenager and her good friend sitting close to each other on the bed. Too close, the teacher thought, and summoned Racheli (a pseudonym) for a talk.

But for Racheli, then in 11th grade at a prestigious ulpana — a high school for religious girls — it had all begun long before.

“I said to myself, ‘Okay, maybe this is an opportunity to get rid of it at last,’” she tells Haaretz. “I knew already from fifth or sixth grade that I had feelings for a girl who was a year older than me. It wasn’t sexual, but I thought about it a lot. I waited for opportunities to speak to her, I sensed that it was strange.”

Racheli kept those feelings to herself. A year passed, and then another. The objects of her love changed, but they were always female.

“I saw that it wasn’t going away and I knew it was a problem. I told a friend about it, and she said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s not that bad, it will pass.’ And I also grew up in a community where such feelings don’t even have a name — it’s just not real,” says Racheli, who’s now in her 20s, adding, “When a well-known artist came out of the closet, for example, people in our circles would say he was doing it for the audience and the ratings. Or they’d say that ‘there are people who choose to be that way, and it’s bad. But you can’t be like that, because it’s not real.’ That’s a recurring motif, in my story too.”

Racheli entered the ulpana’s boarding school in ninth grade. A year later, a new girl also enrolled, she recalls: “At the end of the year we were friends. In 11th grade we were assigned to the same room, with two other girls, and then it became more than friendship.”

One of the challenges in the romantic ties that sprang up was finding ways to be alone in the crowded school. “We were very creative from that point of view. When the homeroom teacher came for lights-out that evening, we were only sitting close to each other — but she sensed something.”

What sort of approach did she take?

Racheli: “At first she said that it happens to a lot of girls of my age, and it’s known as a ‘dependency relationship’ with another girl. The main message was: Hashem [G-d] is placing an obstacle before you that you must overcome, and he is not confronting you with a test you can’t handle. So, either you go on doing it and sin, or you deal with it, restrain yourself and make a sacrifice.

“She said, ‘It’s like you have a car, and every time you’re with your friend you scratch it a little more. In the end it will be all dented — and who will want it?’”

Tough talk from someone with authority.

“I really wanted to please her, I wanted her to think I was a good person. She said she would prefer it if I did ‘nonsense with boys’ and not ‘something like this.’ In the religious world you’re not allowed to touch boys at all. You are allowed to touch girls, but sexual things are forbidden. To say that she would prefer me to violate shmirat negiah [the ban in Jewish religious law on physical contact with the opposite sex, other than in marriage] — wow, that would mean I’m a real criminal. I was ready to do anything to fix that.”

‘Spiritual intervention’

Conversion therapy, which professionals refer to as Sexual Orientation Change Efforts, has been part of the therapeutic domain for men and women both here and abroad for decades. Psychological and other treatment, including electric-shock therapy, sterilization, chemical castration, various types of behavioral therapy, nausea-inducing drugs, psychoactive substances and even sending people to sex workers — all these interventions have been based on a cultural assumption to the effect that homosexuality is not normative behavior, that it is a sin or a mental disorder that can be cured or somehow transformed.

In 1973 the American Psychiatric Association stopped categorizing homosexuality as a disorder. However, according to Aviya Barsheshet, a rehabilitative criminologist, practices aimed at changing a person’s sexual orientation haven’t disappeared, but often take on a spiritual or religious approach. “People who didn’t feel in harmony with their attraction to people of the same sex looked for solutions and relief through spiritual intervention, sometimes combined with psychological guidance.”

Virtually all of the studies that have been conducted on conversion therapy, its failures and the damage it does, have to date dealt with gay men; indeed there is much research-related and theoretical literature available on the subject. A careful online search for studies conducted in the field of conversion therapy for women did not turn up a single article from the past 13 years.

The comprehensive study Barsheshet completed last year on the effects of such therapy on women — as part of her studies for a master’s degree at Bar-Ilan University, under the guidance of criminologist Prof. Tomer Einat — is the first of its kind in Israel. It was based on interviews with 10 women who at the time identified as Orthodox.

How does conversion therapy for women work? According to Barsheshet, who also heads up efforts at the Association for LGBTQ Equality in Israel to combat LGBTQ-phobia, a wide range of techniques is used. One involves the cancellation of a person’s “potential space,” a term coined by psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott that refers to the therapeutic place in which a person feels freest to express all aspects of his or her personality, abilities and aspirations.

“The testimonies of women who took part in the research indicate an absolute annulment by the therapist of the potential space, with the aim of altering their same-sex orientation,” explains Barsheshet, 31, who grew up in a traditional home. “That is contrary to the ethical code of the Israel Psychological Association, according to which ‘psychologists shall respect their clients’ rights to espouse different approaches and views from theirs, and shall act without discrimination against a background of personal or cultural-social differences.’

“Many times,” she continues, “the agenda is declared right at the start: ‘We are here in order to change you. We will make you straight. You will leave here a normal person.’”

Additional methods used in conversion therapy, such as using LGBTQ-phobic rhetoric, attributing women’s same-sex attraction to what Judaism refers to as yetzer hara — the “evil inclination” — and gaslighting, induce a feeling of confusion and damage patients’ conceptual autonomy and their ability to make decisions about their life. The therapists involved run the gamut from psychologists to guidance counselors at ulpanot, to rabbis’ wives, to social workers. Some offer what they call “alternative” or “spiritual” treatment that is not necessarily religious.

“The world of therapy in Israel is extremely fragmented,” says Barsheshet, adding that the therapists she heard about from the interviewees in her study “kept throwing comments at them about how they were simply imagining things, saying that they were disoriented, that what they were feeling was not true attraction, that they didn’t know what was good for them. One participant related that the therapist told her, ‘You are attracted to women because you grew up with a lot of boys around you, so you don’t know how a woman is supposed to behave.’ Another woman was told, ‘You are drawn to women because you grew up with only girls around you.’ A third was told that she was too sexual, and another heard that she had ‘a problem with intimate relations’ and didn’t need psychological treatment, she needed a sexologist.

“One way or another,” declares Barsheshet, “the consistent message is that, ‘You are not a lesbian.’”

Shirel, one of the subjects in Barsheshet’s study, described to the researcher the harmful techniques used from the outset of her treatment. “I told the therapist that I was a lesbian and that I wanted to change that, and she immediately dismissed it and said: ‘Don’t worry, you are not a lesbian, who put that into your head? Everything will be fine, you are still young, lucky you came now. Some come at an older age, and so… they are lesbians.’ She made me think I was imagining things, as part of her hurtful erasure of my feelings.”

For her part, Racheli’s homeroom teacher referred her to the school’s therapeutic services. “I mainly remember a judgmental atmosphere, an accusatory gaze,” she told Barsheshet. “The question hovering in the background was ‘Why are you doing something so terrible, so ugly? Why can’t you just be normal?’”

Another widespread treatment technique cited by respondents involved linking same-sex orientation to mental disorders. Racheli’s therapist, for example, believed that the origin of her attraction to women lay in a childhood trauma.

Racheli: “The basic assumption was: You were not born like this, you underwent something. And in order to free yourself from it, you have to understand why it happened to you. Maybe you were sexually assaulted, maybe you didn’t get enough love, maybe it’s something related to your relationship with your parents. It’s always possible to dig and find painful points, but to find such a vulnerable place and to use it against me in order to prove why I am ‘that way’ — that was the worst moment in the therapy.”

Aversion therapy, aimed at reducing unwanted behavior by associating it with something unpleasant, is also widely used in this context. Indeed, the testimonies quoted in the study are extremely disturbing. T. relates that her therapist instructed her to document in a diary her attraction to different women, and every time the level of attraction exceeded what T. considered to be a level of 80 percent — to masturbate while thinking about men: “To actually imagine that I was sleeping with them and that they were penetrating me,” T. told Barsheshet. “To lie on the bed and think that a man is penetrating you, when you don’t want him to — that’s not far from rape.”

B. and Y., who were married to men when they took part in the study, said their therapists encouraged them to have sexual intercourse with their partners, even though doing so distressed them. Barsheshet says one participant told her that “after three months with no sexual contact with her husband she felt wonderful, and after she had to sleep with him she felt devastated. The therapist discerned this, but nevertheless urged her to sleep with him again.”

Conversations with the therapists included tips about having sex, suggestions to use sex props and doing “homework.” The latter might consist of drawing up a list of “what attracts me in men,” or repeatedly making statements like “I am not attracted to women.”

“The therapist said that such declarations enter the consciousness and then influence behavior,” Y. related. “She also gave me examples of married women who decided to have relationships with women and in the end remained alone; they no longer had a family. She [the therapist] told me to think about whether that would be worth it to me.”

In some cases aversion therapy is enhanced by ritual elements. Shirel told us that her therapist, for example, had her participate in a sort of ceremony based on a rather original theory that the therapist herself had concocted.

Shirel: “I told her that I’d had a twin bother at an early stage of [my mother’s] pregnancy and that he hadn’t survived. I should point out that this was at a stage when they didn’t know the sex of the embryo, but I said it was a boy because that’s what I thought it was. Together we created a whole story based on the fact that because of an unconscious feeling of guilt, I had been compensating for the fact that he wasn’t born by having appropriated a ‘male side.’”

The next stage, involving parting from the “twin brother,” caused Shirel deep discomfort. “We held a kind of funeral. The implicit message was that I needed to be more feminine in order to be straight. Everyone who knows me knows I have a tomboy side, and the idea was for me to make that side disappear: to put on makeup, to refrain from supposedly masculine activities like playing soccer, or to avoid wearing Blundstone shoes, which were popular at the time among female settlers but were considered masculine.

“On one hand, it’s superficial,” Shirel notes, “but in practice it’s sophisticated manipulation — because you are constantly erasing more and more of yourself.”

There’s a clear attempt to change women.

Shirel: “There’s a message of ‘Fake it till you make it,’ and if not, then simply ‘Fake it.’ It would be wonderful if you wanted it [heterosexuality], but even if you don’t want it, do what’s needed, even if it breaks you.”

A type of brainwashing

Why did these women continue go to therapy sessions and carry out instructions that caused them such deep distress? In Barsheshet’s view, such behavior is related to the perceived status — both professional and religious — of the therapists.

“A famous study by [American psychologist Stanley] Milgram in 1963 found that people tend to obey orders from an authoritative source, even to the level of endangering others or themselves. Similarly, despite the voice of logic the women heard in their heads, there was total acceptance of the therapists engaged in conversion therapy and absolute cooperation with their directives.”

Still, some of the patients plucked up the courage to stop the treatments at their own initiative. For Shirel, social media was helpful. “I listened to music by lesbians and I followed groups on Facebook that have helped bring about a true revolution among the religious public. I remember there was a moment when I understood that to go to therapy was simply to go against myself, to get into a state of mind where I believed there were bad things in me that I needed to erase from myself.”

She also immersed herself for the first time in the writings of the late […] Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, aka Rav Shagar, who addressed the issue of Judaism and postmodernism. “He gave me air to breathe,” Shirel says. “The infinite loop — which involved finding a theory that would explain the reason I became the way I am — ate away at me internally, a little more each day.

“According to Rav Shagar, even if I wasn’t born that way [i.e., homosexual], it didn’t necessarily mean that it wasn’t G-d’s will. Social construction can also be the will of Hashem and we must respect that. Even if something happened to me at the age of 3, it didn’t happen for no reason. It’s a long story, all this gritting of teeth vis-à-vis G-d, but in the end I understood that G-d wanted me to live a good life in which there is love.”

Racheli sought treatment at the request of her homeroom teacher, but was offended by the therapist and told her teacher she had decided to stop going.

“I believed the therapist — the possibility that something had happened to me in childhood, but throughout the therapy I felt that she didn’t respect me. That she wasn’t hearing me, that she was denigrating me,” she explains. “The teacher said I could do different therapy, outside the ulpana, but that my parents would have to enter the picture because they would have to pay for it. I begged her, ‘This is the secret of my life, that I kept hidden for so many years, please don’t tell my parents.’ She said there was no choice — and told them.”

Racheli’s parents did not take the news well, and persuaded her to see a private therapist. “At first she said told me the therapy didn’t have a specific purpose and that we would get to wherever we would get to. But in retrospect, it turned out that she told my parents, ‘Don’t worry, she’ll get over it and all will be well.’”

So it wasn’t just a situation of your trust in one person being shattered, but a number of factors.

Racheli: “Today I know how easy it is to destabilize a person’s concept of reality. For years I looked for validation — to be told, ‘Yes, it’s possible that this is who you are.’ I knew what I felt inside, but the people around me and the therapists told me that it wasn’t my nature, that it would pass in the end. I thought that I could still marry a man, even though that didn’t interest me at all, so for years I dated boys.”

How did you feel?

“Like something in me had died. During that period I was already a student in a midrasha [equivalent of men’s yeshiva] and I abstained entirely from women. It was such a dull year, I was lifeless. A year later I was with a woman and felt like I had broken a fast. It’s a very powerful feeling.”

We are in the living room of the apartment Racheli and her (nonreligious) partner rent. Beyond the balcony the lights of the city glitter. The beit midrash (religious study hall) she attends, and which accepts her with open arms, is walking distance away. Its library is replete with books of Gemara and Mishnah.

“I didn’t really leave religion,” she insists. “My whole world was built on fear of transgressions, and I no longer perceive religion like I did at the ulpana — with all the sins, transgressions and commandments. I went on a journey, I relinquished the religion I grew up with and found a vitalizing Judaism.”

There are those who maintain, by contrast, that it’s impossible to be both a lesbian and religious.

Racheli: “It’s said of the Torah that it can be an elixir of death and an elixir of life, and I feel that a Torah that coerces me to act against my heart is an elixir of death. A Torah in which I can be religious, learn in havruta [study with a companion], observe Shabbat and also be with someone whom my soul truly loves — that is a Torah of life.”

[…]

Because conversion therapy takes place in various frameworks and is thus under the radar, it’s not possible to estimate its scale. Along with the interviewees in this article, Barsheshet also believes that it’s a more widespread phenomenon than most people think: “It takes women months and years, if ever, to understand that what they went through in conversion therapy. There is no law barring it, and in the absence of legislation, it continues to take place uninterruptedly. In other words, as we speak, conversion therapy is being conducted on teenagers of both sexes, for men and women, and also for young people on the trans spectrum.”

Can it be said that the more devout, conservative and closed a community is, the more prevalent conversion therapy will be among its members?

“Not necessarily. The religious community in Israel is very diverse today. There are communities characterized by feminist consciousness and equal rights. The exposure issue is also meaningful. Meaning, when I see around me LGBTQ figures, or I meet LGBTQ families — that normalizes the situation for me. Each case is really different, which only illustrates that religious society is dynamic and is undergoing considerable change.”

Nadav Schwartz, a social entrepreneur in the religious LGBTQ community and a lecturer on the subject, observes that while the number of men undergoing conversion therapy is on the decline, the number of women subject to that form of treatment is increasing.

Schwartz attributes the change of approach to religious people who came out and spoke openly about themselves, including as part of the “Our Faces” project in 2015, involving the documentation on video of the stories of over 70 religious LGBTQ people. In addition, more and more religious and nonreligious men have spoken openly during the past decade about the conversion therapy they underwent and the harm it did them.

“Even people who in the past openly supported conversion therapy are today in a completely different place,” says Schwartz, who himself underwent such therapy. “I don’t see anyone being interviewed with their face exposed, saying that their therapy worked.”

If so, why do you think conversion therapy for women is flourishing?

Schwartz: “Conversion therapy was tried on men for years and wasn’t successful. So there is more awareness of the subject among men, and more resistance by men, whereas among women the subject is talked about less. What didn’t work with men is now being implemented with women, even if the therapy is masked with terms like ‘reorientation,’ ‘therapy to find one’s true self’ or ‘examination of sexuality.’”

“Once conversion therapy became anathema to the public, organizations supporting it simply switched gears and started to operate under the guise of providing sex therapy or family therapy,” explains Hadas Benayahu Elyasyan, a clinical psychologist and former executive director of Shoval, an organization that works to promote acceptance of LGBTQ people in religious society.

“They are not declaring explicitly that they engage in conversion therapy,” she says, “but in practice it happens — in clinics, in professional training programs and at conferences. It just has a different wrapping.”

(Emphasis original.)

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/2881684

Sources like Jewish-Christian Relations, Unpacked, and so forth have been trying to formalize their accusation that anti‐Zionism is antisemitic by claiming that Zionism means Jewish self‐determination. The claim that Zionism equals Jewish self‐determination is mostly ahistorical, and as the Nitter thread above shows, we really have no good reason to believe that it is Jews’ only path to self‐determination. In fact, that very claim is self‐destroying because it tells anticolonial Jews that their conceptions of self‐determination are invalid, and that there can be no alternative to neocolonialism.

We’ll ignore the elephant in the room (‘What about the Palestinians?’) simply for the sake of argument, and instead take a closer look at how this supposed ‘self‐determination’ expresses itself. As socialists, we know all too well that all dictatorships of the bourgeoisie are antidemocratic, including ones that claim not to be, and they primarily serve the rich and powerful at our expense. It would absurd to claim, for example, that there are thousands of houseless Jews on Palestinian land because the Jewish people must have collectively decided that that is how it should be.

That is simply the most obvious way, but we can augment this argument by proving that the neocolony is not (and never has been) democratic even by neoliberalism’s own criteria. Some key points to remember:

• There is no constitution, written or otherwise. This only makes it easier for the rulers to redefine their government at will and it makes them less accountable, since no citizens of the neocolony can argue that the élites were breaking their own rules. The Knesset (neocolonial parliament), which is the legislative branch, regularly passes laws without any significant input from the lower classes. In this respect, the neocolony is comparable to Fascist Italy, which also had an unaccountable parliament.
• There is little to no separation between the legislative and executive branches. This only makes it easier for the élites to pass laws that are unlikely to be in ordinary people’s best interests, and it is the Knesset, not ordinary people, which elects the government’s members, who in turn (almost) always protect the head of state.
• In a heated argument between the now deeply unpopular head of state Benjamin Netanyahu and former head of state Ehud Olmert in 2021, Netanyahu admitted that he’ll use the IDF for his own purposes, which by implication excludes ordinary people, who are powerless to stop him.
• The supreme court is nothing but an extension of the Knesset: the supreme court has to obey the parliament, not ordinary people, and it cannot enact its own laws or cancel them; the head of state can also shut down this supreme court if he finds it necessary.
• The neocolony makes it difficult for ordinary Jewish citizens to publicly express their opposition. For example, there was a little‐known incident on the morning of December 2 when the régime arrested six protesters, and I think that the only reason it didn’t go after the thousands of protesters later that day was simply because there were too many people to arrest. (The fact that thousands of people have to protest at all should already be a clue that there is no democracy, but neoliberals would disagree on that.)

So we see that the neocolony is another plutocracy that cannot possibly hope to represent millions of its citizens, much less Jews across the world. This, in addition to the numerous ways that it harms (mostly lower‐class) Jews, proves that Zionism is not an expression of Jewish self‐determination. Logically, this would only be possible if Jewish people were algophiles who were addicted to the constant thrill of danger, but self‐harm is a phenomenon that few people consider tolerable.

Lastly, the apartheid régime is heavily dependent on Imperial America, both economically and diplomatically, and it is quite doubtful that it could survive for long without the empire’s support. Hence, apartheid officials were shocked when Washington announced a 17% tariff on their régime. This may be the most indisputable evidence that there is no Jewish self-determination in occupied Palestine, because while the régime may indeed have a few bargaining chips of its own, the relationship remains largely asymmetrical, especially now that it has become an international pariah.

Zionists do not tell Jewish people that they get to define their own destiny. Instead, Zionists tell Jewish people to immigrate to a neocolony as soon as possible, to take land and other resources away from native people, to avoid associating theirselves with them, to obey an antidemocratic régime, and to disparage anybody who disagrees with this vision. That is how Zionism obstructs Jewish self‐determination.

On Monday afternoon, a group of Clergy from many different faith backgrounds walked to the LA city jail where immigrants are processed before being deported or taken off to ICE detention. They demanded to see the people who had been detained over the weekend. See footage of their action on local tv.

(Taken from an email sent to me by Never Again Action.)

Etta Federn was bornon April 28th 1883 in Vienna, the youngest daughter of an assimilated Jewish family. She was the daughter of the suffragette Ernestine Federn and the doctor Salomon Federn and the sister of Paul, who became an analyst, Karl, who became a lawyer and writer, and Walter who became a journalist.

She had an education on an equal footing with her brothers. She studied literary history, German and Greek literature. After graduation she began to study German and philosophy. In addition, she received a broad education in foreign languages.

She broke with her family and moved to Berlin, where she completed her studies with a thesis on Faust. She earned her living there first as a teacher and then as a translator from English, French, Danish, Russian and Yiddish. She translated Alexandra Kollontai, Hans Christian Anderson and Shakespeare.

She worked as a literary critic for the newspaper Berliner Tageblatt. She published many biographies including those of Dante and Goethe. At the same time she began to write essays, biographies, autobiographical, stories, a play and poems. She married twice, both marriages ending in separation.

She made contact with the anarchist movement in Berlin and began to participate in the activities of the German anarcho-syndicalist union the FAUD (Free Workers' Union of Germany - Freie Arbeiter Union Deutschlands), contributing articles to its press on a regular basis. She began to make many friends within this movement.

The anarchist movement in Berlin attracted in Etta’s own words many “self-motivated Jewish women who offered their intellectual, emotional and political support to the ideas of social revolution, free education, the importance of cultural work, women’s emancipation and the importance of solidarity and responsible behaviour”.

She met Emma Goldman, Mollie Steimer, and Sonia Flechin, among others. In particular, she maintained a close friendship with Rudolf Rocker and Milly Witkop for life. She took an active part in the women’s organisation founded by the FAUD, the Syndikalistischen Frauenbund -Syndicalist Women’s Organisation (SFB).

She received death threats from the Nazis as a result of her biography of the liberal politician Walter Rathenau, murdered by right wing officers, which was published in 1927. In addition the forces of reaction put pressure on the newspapers and publishing houses she usually wrote for, so that her sources of income began to dry up.

She left Germany for Barcelona in 1932, at the age of 49 with her two sons. In 1933 her books were amongst those destroyed during the Nazi public book burnings and she was placed on the Nazi blacklist.

In Barcelona she received continuing support from the anarchist circles still in Berlin, and in turn she was able to welcome those fleeing to Berlin later. She was able to adapt quickly to Barcelona, writing articles for the Spanish press within weeks and starting to learn Catalan. However, she remained financially straitened, and had to rely on small but regular transfers of money from her close relatives in the USA.

During the Spanish revolution she joined Mujeres Libres (Free Women), the anarchist women’s movement, in July 1936. She taught literature, language and education at the cultural centre set up by Mujeres Libres, the House of the Woman Worker, was based on the teachings of the Spanish libertarian educationalist, Francisco Ferrer.

Later , in 1937, she founded, in collaboration with Mujeres Libres, four libertarian schools in the Catalan city of Blanes. These schools, of which she was the director, trained teachers as well as teaching children. They were co-educational, with an orientation towards atheism and antimilitarism, and designed to have an anxiety free, stimulating and caring atmosphere for children.

In May 1937 she returned to Barcelona and had her book Mujeres de las Revoluciones , which included biographical sketches of twelve famous women, published by Mujeres Libres.

In 1938, because of the massive bombing raids on Barcelona she left for Paris with her two sons.

Between 1940-1945 she moved to Lyons. She was by now completely exhausted physically and sometimes seriously ill. Despite this, she engaged in resistance work through translations, propaganda work and organisation.

Her oldest son Hans died in 1944 in the fighting at Vercors. Paradoxically it was because of this that she became entitled to French nationality and a small monthly pension, although she remained in poverty until her death in Paris ion May 9th, 1951.

She features as a literary personality in a novel of the Swedish anarchist writer Stig Dagerman (who had married the German anarchist Annemarie Goetze) Skuggen av Mart (Stockholm 1947) and in Utan Vaiaktig stad (Stockholm 1948) the novel of another Swedish writer, Arne Fosberg.

• Article by Nick Heath

• 🐻Link to all Hexbear comms https://hexbear.net/post/1403966

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Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):

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• 🌈 LGBTQ+ Resource Post
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• ❤️Foundations of Leninism
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Quoting Gilbert Achcar’s The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab–Israeli War of Narratives, pages 37–8:

Boasting a circulation that rose, late in the decade, to 40,000 copies, a third of which were sold in Arab capitals beyond Egypt’s borders, Al‐Risāla provided a forum for some of the most prestigious Egyptian and non‐Egyptian Arab intellectuals of the period: its contributors included ʻAli ʻAbdul‐Rāziq, Ahmad Amīn, ʻAbbās Mahmūd al‐ʻAqqād, Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Tāha Hussein, Tawfīq al‐Hakīm,¹⁰ Mahmūd Taymūr, and Sātiʻ al‐Husri.¹¹

[…]

Avoiding the trap into which ultranationalists and religious conservatives fell, it struggled against all forms of the illusion that [the Third Reich] was pro‐Arab because it was anti‐Jewish: Al‐Risāla denounced [German Fascism] “as a ‘white imperialist attack’ on the Semitic peoples, first and foremost against the Arabs and Muslims,”¹³ while assailing the specific form of anti‐Judaism peculiar to [Fascist] anti‐Semitism. Yet all this went hand in hand with fierce denunciation of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine.¹⁴

Gershoni insists that Al‐Risāla was in no sense marginal or exceptional: “It was actually the pro‐fascist […] intellectual voices that were peripheral.”¹⁵ He offered further proof a few years later in a study of another […] publication, the Egyptian monthly Al‐Hilāl (The Crescent), which played a key rôle in shaping culture in the Middle East.¹⁶

Like Al‐Risāla, Al‐Hilāl methodically denounced the […] imperialistic and racist nature of [Germanic] and Italian fascism. Gershoni dwells in particular on two essays that appeared in July and August 1933, one about the great mass slaughters of history, the other about anti‐Semitism; Al‐Hilāl warned that the Jews might fall victim to a massacre on a scale with the one that had decimated the Armenians, which it cited as the most terrible in modern history.¹⁷

(Emphasis added.)

…wow.

תרבחו ותסעדו ! Hope all of you are having a good and great Mimouna , stay safe and much love .

He was the one who wrote “The Scroll of the Steamed Portions of Ham.”

(Mirror.)

Neither the gesture nor the rebuke fazed Israel365, whose founder calls it “Israel’s voice in the MAGA movement,” and which caters to an evangelical Christian audience. On Saturday night, the group is hosting an event in Dallas where, it confirmed to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, it will proudly fete Bannon as the guest of honor.

Bannon — whose podcast, “War Room,” commands considerable influence among pro-Trump diehards — will also deliver a speech and answer questions. The event is hosted by Israel365 Action, the group’s advocacy arm, which is running a slate in the upcoming elections for the World Zionist Congress.

“We are grateful to Steve Bannon for using his voice and his War Room platform to help the Jewish State achieve Total Victory and are proud to honor him this Saturday night as a Warrior for Israel,” Rabbi Tuly Weisz, Israel365’s founder, wrote in an email to JTA.

In a subsequent message, he wrote, “Anyone who listens to Bannon, knows that he is a Warrior for Israel, and is frequently even criticized for being the most pro-Israel voice in the movement.”

Even as Israel365 is rebuffing those who call Bannon an antisemite, the event has sparked some local controversy. It was originally set to take place at a local Orthodox Jewish day school, Akiba Yavneh Academy, but at least one parent complained and the school canceled.

“Appalled and embarrassed that my children’s school is the location this event is taking place,” the parent, who asked to remain anonymous, wrote on Torah Trumps Hate, a Facebook group largely of Orthodox Jews who oppose Trump. “How any Jewish group is comfortable aligning with antisemite Steve Bannon is crazy to me.”

The parent praised the school for cancelling. Akiba Yavneh did not respond to JTA requests for comment on Friday, but Weisz confirmed that the school canceled the event booking shortly after Bannon was announced as a speaker.

The school is not the only institution to distance itself from Bannon. His gesture at the conservative confab CPAC last week drew criticism from Jewish groups, including the Anti-Defamation League, which called out his “long and disturbing history of stoking antisemitism and hate, threatening violence, and empowering extremists.”

The blowback extended beyond the Jewish community and into Bannon’s own political camp. Far-right French leader Jordan Bardella canceled his own CPAC appearance because of Bannon’s gesture, which Bardella called “a gesture alluding to Nazi ideology.” Bannon denied it was a Nazi salute and said Bardella “wets himself like a little child.”

The gesture was the latest one by a pro-Trump figure after Elon Musk, the billionaire Trump adviser, made a similar salute at an inauguration event in January, drawing widespread criticism.

Another wave of criticism came in response to Bannon’s subsequent statement that “the number-one enemy to the people in Israel are American Jews that do not support Israel and do not support MAGA.”

I’m kind of drekposting here since this is barely Judaism-related, but I felt like sharing some positivity and I hope that the moderators don’t mind.

Performance proper starts at 10:50

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6610351

Nineteen years after this Citizenship Law of 1952 was enacted, my parents moved from the U.S. to Jerusalem and were granted citizenship and full rights under the “Law of Return.” Out of a youthful naivete that would deepen into willful ignorance, they managed to become both American liberals who opposed the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, while also acting as armed settlers of another people’s land.

They moved into a Jerusalem neighborhood that had been ethnically cleansed only a few years earlier. They occupied a home built and recently inhabited by a Palestinian family whose community was expelled to Jordan and then violently barred from returning at the barrel of a gun — and by the citizenship papers my family held in their hands.

This 1-to-1 replacement was not a secret. People like my family lived in these quarters precisely because it was an “Arab house,” proudly advertised as such for its elegant, high-ceilinged design in opposition to the drably utilitarian, haphazardly constructed apartment blocks of the settler Zionists. I was born in the ethnically cleansed Palestinian village of Ayn Karim, much prized for possessing all the native Arab charm with none of the actual native Arabs to unsettle the pretty picture. My father was in the Israeli military, from which he and many of his friends emerged, after the monstrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982, liberal proponents of “peace.”

But to them, that word still meant living in a Jewish-majority country; it was a “peace” in which the original sin of the state, the ongoing process of ethnic cleansing, would remain firmly in place, legitimated and thereby more secure than ever. They sought peace, in other words, for Jews with Israeli citizenship, but for Palestinians, “peace” meant full surrender, a permanent occupation and exile.

All of this is to say: I don’t regard my decision to renounce this citizenship as an effort to reverse a legal status as much as it is an acknowledgement that this status never held any legitimacy to begin with. Israeli citizenship law is predicated on the worst kinds of violent crimes we know of, and on a deepening litany of lies intended to whitewash those crimes.

The look of officialdom, the trappings of lawful governance, with their seals of the Ministry of the Interior, testify to nothing other than this state’s slippery effort to conceal its fundamental unlawfulness. These are forged documents. They are, more importantly, a blunt instrument used to continually displace actual living people, families, entire populations of the land’s Indigenous inhabitants.

In its genocidal campaign to erase Palestine’s Indigenous people, the state has weaponized my very existence, my birth and identity — and those of so many others. The wall that keeps Palestinians from returning home is constituted as much by identity papers as by concrete slabs. Our job must be to remove those concrete slabs, to rip up the phony papers, and to disrupt the narratives that make these structures of oppression and injustice appear legitimate or, god forbid, inevitable.

To those who will breathlessly invoke the talking point that Jews “have a right to self-determination,” I will only say that if such a right does exist, it cannot possibly involve the invasion, occupation and ethnic cleansing of another people. Nobody has that right. Moreover, one can think of a few European countries that owe land and reparations to their persecuted Jews. The Palestinian people, however, never owed Jews anything for the crimes committed by European antisemitism, nor do they today.

My personal belief, like many of my 20th century ancestors, is that Jewish liberation is inseparable from broad social movements. That is why so many Jews were socialists in pre-war Europe, and why many of us connect to that tradition today.

As an observant Jew, I believe the Torah is radical in its contention that Jewish people, or any people, have no right at all to any land, but rather are bound by rigorous ethical responsibilities. Indeed, if the Torah has one single message, it’s that if you oppress the widow and the orphan, if you deal corruptly in government-sanctioned greed and violence, and if you acquire land and wealth at the expense of regular people, you will be cast out by the God of righteousness. The Torah is routinely waved around by land-worshipping nationalists as though it were a deed of ownership, but, if actually read, it is a record of prophetic rebuke against the abuse of state power.

The only entity with sovereign rights, according to the Torah, is the God of justice, the God who despises the usurper and the occupier. Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism or Jewish history other than that its leaders have long seen in these deep sources a series of powerfully mobilizing narratives with which to push their colonial agenda — and it is that colonial agenda alone that we must address. The constant efforts to evoke the history of Jewish victimhood in order to justify or to simply distract from the actions of an economic and military powerhouse would be positively laughable if they weren’t so cynically weaponized and deadly.

Zionist colonization cannot be reformed or liberalized: Its existential identity, as expressed in its citizenship laws and repeated openly by those citizens, amounts to a commitment to genocide. Calls for arms embargoes, as well as for boycotts, divestment and sanctions, are commonsense demands. But they are not a political vision. Decolonization is. It is both the path and the destination. We all must orient our organizing accordingly.