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This year’s Father's Day round-up features recipes from different ends of the Jewish spectrum: dill pickle kraut and a Moroccan tomato dip.

The post Father’s Day Food appeared first on Jewish Journal.

We are truly free when we let go of the thought that the past could or should have been any different than it was. This is so hard.

The challenge is born from our desperate need to validate our feelings and experiences. It often feels like we are invalidating ourselves if we let go of the thought that the past should have been different. We have been through hell, experienced things most people don’t know about, and it initially feels so devastating to think of just letting it go like it never happened. Where is the justice in that?

I …

(RNS) — The closest Kareem Sarsour had come to seeing his father in more than two months was standing outside an Indiana county jail where he is being held by immigration officials. 

Salah Sarsour, a Muslim Palestinian leader and green card holder, was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in March. Kareem Sarsour’s visit requests have been repeatedly denied. 

“It’s heartbreaking and deeply upsetting to know my father is only a few steps away, yet I can’t see him, check on him, or give him a hug,” Kareem said. “It was a very painful ride back knowing we left my father there.”

But on Sunday (June 14), Kareem Sarsour’s spirits were buoyed as he stood beside dozens of American Jews who drove in from neighboring states to rally outside the Clay County Jail to demand Sarsour’s release.

Many American Jews feel an obligation to support Sarsour, said Jodi Melamed, an organizer with the Milwaukee chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace.

“It is very rare, especially since Oct. 7, 2023, to have so many Jews from such a wide variety of perspectives on Israel come together to defend a Palestinian for Palestinian speech,” said Melamed.

National Muslim advocacy groups see Sarsour’s arrest as part of a politically motivated campaign to stifle pro-Palestinian speech in the United States. That view is increasingly shared by other faith groups in the U.S., including some Jews.

Progressive Jewish advocacy organizations condemn what they view as a misguided attempt to fight antisemitism by targeting Palestinians like Sarsour.

“The administration is specifically conflating the fight for Jewish safety with the ways that people are standing up for Palestinian rights, and then using that as a strategy to push an anti-immigrant agenda and crack down on civil liberties broadly,” said Jamie Beran, chief executive officer of Bend the Arc, a Jewish social justice organization. 

Homeland Security officials have described Sarsour as a national security threat with ties to terrorist groups. 

In an April statement, the agency said Sarsour, who grew up in the occupied West Bank, had been convicted of throwing molotov cocktails at armed Israeli forces before being granted entry to the United States in 1993. A spokesperson also alleged that Sarsour lied in his green card application. 

Sarsour’s lawyers have argued that U.S. officials knew about his history since 1993, when his visa application was approved. They say his detention was politically motivated. 

In a status hearing on June 8, Sarsour’s attorneys asked a federal judge to release him, saying his health has deteriorated.

Sarsour was also denied a Quran and has been repeatedly interrupted by guards when he is trying to pray, his attorneys wrote in a May 29 letter to U.S. District Court Judge James Patrick Hanlon. When Sarsour, who is diabetic, asked for an adequate diet, his lawyer Luna Droubi said he was told to purchase barbecue pork rinds from the commissary, which would violate Muslim dietary laws, which forbid pork products.

U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Wis., who was able to visit Sarsour on the day of the protest, said he was not receiving adequate medical care for his diabetes.

“Salah is being targeted for his advocacy for Palestinians, but his mistreatment is part of the Trump administration’s larger campaign of hate against immigrants,” she said in a statement Sunday. 

Sarsour was president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee, the largest mosque in that city, before his arrest. He was also a board member of American Muslims for Palestine, a national organization focused on education about Palestinians. 

Melamed, a longtime friend of Sarsour’s, described him as a bridge builder with strong ties to interfaith communities in Milwaukee. As a board member of the mosque’s K-12 school, Sarsour helped create a strong Holocaust education program, helping bring Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein to the school more than once.

“He’s the papa bear of our interfaith community, and that’s why it’s so hard and so shocking and really cruel,” Melamed said of Sarsour. 

American Jewish communities are divided over support for Israel. But there is wide agreement among American Jews that the Trump administration’s massive deportation agenda is unjust and in many cases unlawful.

“It should be a given that we’re here because we are Jews,” said Rabbi Bruce Elder of Congregation Hakafa in Glencoe, Illinois, who spoke at the protest. “You cannot separate the Jewish immigrant experience from other immigrants that are coming through. Our Jewish textual tradition calls for us to be here.”

Elder, who is also affiliated with the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs and T’ruah, the rabbinical human rights group, said he does not think support for the Palestinians should be tied to antisemitism.

“The cover of fighting antisemitism from an administration that has some of the most racist antisemites — using that to try to divide us against other folks, to me, is an incredible concern,” he said.

Progressive Jewish groups have also supported and advocated for several international student leaders targeted with detention or deportation for their pro-Palestinian activism, including former Columbia University students Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi.

In Colorado Springs, Colorado, local Jewish advocates and Christian groups have supported Hayam El Gamal and her five children, who were released after 10 months from ICE custody. ICE had been trying to deport the family since El Gamal’s ex-husband was charged with attempted murder for throwing molotov cocktails at protesters who’d gathered in support of Israeli hostages in Gaza — an attack his family said it knew nothing about.

Erin Adlerstein, who organized a Jewish-led rally last month asking for due process for Hayam El Gamal and her children, acknowledged the horror of Mohamed Soliman’s attack on the Boulder Jewish community. “But as a neighbor of the El Gamal family, it just does not serve me in any way to hold these children responsible for the actions of their father,” Adlerstein said. 

For Kareem Sarsour, the presence of Jews at the protest demanding his father’s release was meaningful.

Interfaith unity, he said, counters ICE’s goal of “breaking us as a community and picking on us one by one.”

(RNS) — Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, declared the end of the Hebron Accord on Tuesday (June 16), further undermining agreements with the Palestinian Authority and furthering Israel’s efforts to extend control over the West Bank.

But Israel’s Foreign Ministry quickly clarified only parts of the agreement are canceled that had given the Palestinian Authority and the Hebron municipality three decades of control over planning and construction at the burial site of the patriarch Abraham.

The site, known to Muslims as the Ibrahimi Mosque and to Jews as Ma’arat HaMakhpela — the Cave of the Patriarchs, in English — is the second-most-sacred site to both Jews and Muslims in the Holy Land. According to tradition, it was purchased by Abraham and, in addition to his own grave, houses those of the biblical patriarchs Isaac and Jacob, as well as the matriarchs Sarah, Rebecca and Leah. 

The Security Cabinet decision gives Israeli authorities increased control over the holy sites in Hebron, as well as other holy sites in the West Bank, such as the tomb of the matriarch Rachel in Bethlehem. It also means Israelis living in Hebron will no longer need to depend on the Palestinian Authority for day-to-day sanitation and road maintenance issues.

The Hebron Accord, facilitated by the U.S., divided the city into two security zones, allowing 80% Palestinian control. It was signed in 1997 as part of a series of agreements often referred to as the Oslo Accords that established the Palestinian Authority and its jurisdiction over the West Bank. 

The dilution of the Hebron Accord comes at a time when the status quo around several of the region’s holy sites is facing an uncertain future.

In May, reports indicated that U.S. and Israeli leaders were mulling cutting Jordan’s royal family out of their traditional role as custodians of the Temple Mount. Last week, Theophilos III, the Greek Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem and one of the key custodians of Christian sites in the Old City, met with President Donald Trump in Washington and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis in Athens to gather support for his church’s continued custodianship of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. 

Smotrich, the head of the Religious Zionist party in Israel’s Knesset and a leader in the settlement movement, made the remarks at the dedication of a new settlement in the Hebron hills region of the West Bank on Tuesday. 

“For many years, one of the most absurd clauses of the Oslo Accords remained in place, in which authority over the Jewish settlement in Hebron and the holy sites were dependent on the terrorist municipality of Hebron,” Smotrich told the crowd, according to Israeli media. “Yesterday we put an end to that.”

The Foreign Ministry responded on X, saying the Hebron Accord has not been canceled. 

“Several months ago, the Security Cabinet adopted a decision that specifically concerns jurisdictions in the field of planning and construction with regard to the Jewish community in Hebron and Jewish heritage sites,” the Foreign Ministry said on X. “This decision was made following years of a complete lack of cooperation on these matters by the Hebron Municipality. Beyond that, no changes have been made.”

Jewish leaders in Hebron also stressed that much of the accords will remain in place, but the Palestinian Authority’s veto power over construction of new buildings would be circumvented. 

“There are some responsibilities that have been returned to the Jewish municipality,” Noam Arnon, a spokesman for the Hebron Jewish community, told Religion News Service. “Authority over building and planning and the Jewish buildings and Jewish community now will not be in the hands of the Palestinian Authority but in the hands of the Jewish authority.” 

Less than a day after Smotrich’s announcement, construction of a large yeshiva complex and more than 500 housing units was approved in the Hebron Area — the first time in decades without Palestinian consent, Israeli media reported. 

Arnon noted that Israeli authorities had already begun work on modernizing the water, electrical and air conditioning system on the Jewish side of the Cave of the Patriarchs, something that previously would have required the Palestinian Authority’s green light. 

He said that the changes would not impact the Muslim side of the site and that it would not impact Muslim Palestinians’ freedom of prayer there. 

The head of Hebron’s Jewish community, Eyal Gelman, called the changes “a historic decision.”

“Israel deepens its roots … lifting the honor of the entire nation,” the Jewish Community of Hebron said in a June 16 statement. “These powers will allow the Hebron local council to build and expand in the city of the founding fathers and mothers.”

Hebron has long been one of the starkest flashpoints in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Unique in the West Bank, it’s the only place with an Israeli settlement in the middle of a major Palestinian urban center. 

The West Bank’s largest city, Hebron has an Arab population of over 200,000, while some 700 Jewish Israelis live on a few streets of its old city, not far from the Cave of the Patriarchs. 

The Hebron Accords expelled the Israeli military from most of the city that came under Palestinian control but kept Israeli soldiers in about 20% of Hebron around the Jewish settlement, resulting in some 35,000 Palestinians living under Israeli rule.

Smotrich’s declaration Tuesday has been widely criticized by leaders in and outside of the region. 

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas “stressed that such unilateral measures are rejected and condemned, and constitute a violation of signed agreements with the Israeli side, as well as a breach of international law and international legitimacy, which prohibit altering the status quo in the occupied territory of the State of Palestine,” according to a statement put out by his office.

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which represents 57 Muslim nations, similarly warned that Israel’s plans in Hebron amount to undermining its political, historical and legal status.

Washington responded by warning against annexation as President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spar over Trump’s own unilateral moves to end the U.S.-Israel war with Iran. 

“As the president has clearly stated, he does not support Israel annexing the West Bank,” a State Department spokesperson told Israeli media. “A stable West Bank keeps Israel secure and is in line with this administration’s goal to achieve peace in the region.”

(RNS) — Although my parents raised me from my birth in Baltimore and I had the happiest of childhoods, I only came to really know my father, Rabbi Simcha Shafran, who died in 2016 at 91, in the final 30-odd years of his life.

That’s because he spoke very little about his life before his immigration to the United States in 1947, and his becoming a citizen shortly thereafter. And I was too stupid to ask him about those years.

It was only around 1990, as an adult living with my own family in Providence, Rhode Island, that I learned about his youth.

The lesson arrived in the mail, on a cassette tape sent me by someone who had recorded a speech my father delivered to an audience on Holocaust Remembrance Day. He apparently felt more comfortable relating his story to strangers than to his own children.

I came to realize his reticence had been because he hadn’t wanted to burden my sister, brother and me with the weight of the harrowing years of his youth.

How, for instance, at the age of 14 in his native Poland, Simcha Bunim Szafranowicz — the name he was born with — had stubbornly insisted his parents let him study in yeshiva, even though what would come to be known as World War II had begun mere weeks earlier, and the family was fleeing the approaching Nazis.

How SS men who had caught up with his family and other refugees from their town, Ruzhan, killed his uncle in front of him and packed my father and hundreds of other Jews into a synagogue, locked them in and set fire to neighboring homes. Preparing to die, the Jews were rescued at the last minute by a German army official who passed by and ordered the Jews to be let out. It was the Prophet Elijah, they suspected — who, in Jewish tradition, appears throughout history to save Jews — here, in strikingly unusual disguise.

How the boy’s parents reluctantly gave him their blessing — they didn’t know, after all, where would be the safest place for him — and said goodbye to him. As it turned out, for the last time.

That was the beginning of a journey that would take young Simcha to Siberia, and then America, where, as Rabbi Simcha Shafran, he would become a revered, beloved rabbi of a congregation.

In the fall of 1939, the boy who would become my father, holding his tefillin — the small leather boxes holding pieces of parchment with certain Torah verses on them, bound to leather straps and placed on one’s arm and head — and some apples his mother had given him, set out for the Novardok Yeshiva in the Polish town of Bialystok.

En route, he discovered that all the Polish yeshivas had relocated to Vilna, Lithuania. In the train station, he recalled, he heard and heeded a voice in his head crying “Simcha! Get on the train!” to Vilna, and managed to pull himself onto the platform between two cars.

He ended up in the relocated Novardok Yeshiva in a Lithuanian town called Birzh, where the yeshiva functioned until the Soviets took over in 1941 and demanded that all refugees become Soviet citizens.

My father and his fellow students knew that accepting Soviet citizenship would have made them cannon fodder in the army, and they refused the offer. As foreign nationals, they were put on cattle trains, with a hole in each car’s floor acting as a toilet, and, weeks later, arrived at a Siberian work camp, where they were ordered to fell trees, chop wood, harvest grain and grind it.

My father was the youngest of the group that spent the rest of the war in the frozen taiga, along with their teacher, Rabbi Yehudah Nekritz.

When working, they would discuss Talmud lessons or recite Psalms. They would not allow the Soviets to rob them of their spiritual heritage. In their shelter, they always had a chessboard, mid-game, in front of them, in case their overseer — who hated religion — should stop by.

The exiles used an assortment of tricks to avoid working on the Sabbath, clandestinely baked matzos for Passover and jerry-rigged a sukkah, a special hut, in the middle of the night to observe the Sukkot festival.

The group survived those years. In 1944, the young men were transferred westward and eventually smuggled into Berlin’s American zone. My father had a bullet wound scar on his arm from when a bribed guard betrayed them and sprayed the truck they were in. I was in my 30s, I think, when he first showed me the scar.

The refugees organized a yeshiva in a town near Frankfurt and resumed their Torah studies. In June 1947, after establishing contact with a relative in the U.S. willing to sponsor him, my father arrived at Ellis Island.

With the $75 given to him by a Jewish social service organization, he bought a new pair of tefillin, his old ones having been well-weathered by Siberia.

In New York, he met the daughter of a respected Baltimore rabbi, Noach Kahn, and courted her. They had only Yiddish in common, and my father, impoverished but resolute, dated my mother by taking walks with her, sometimes subway rides, and singing songs from his yeshiva days. He had a sweet voice and what struck everyone as perfect pitch.

The couple moved to Baltimore and my father became the rabbi of a small synagogue. He picked up English quickly, thanks largely to my mother, who helped him translate sermons he wrote in Yiddish into English.

His income from the synagogue was paltry, and so, even with the counseling, weddings, funerals and hospital visits, my father found the time to attend night school to study accounting. In addition to his rabbinic responsibilities, he became an auditor for the city of Baltimore. He took his obligations seriously, and his co-workers were impressed by his integrity. They said they could set their watches by when he left for lunch break and when he returned to his desk.

Throughout his more than 60 years as a rabbi, my father made deep impressions on young and old, seekers and scoffers, intellectual and spiritual sorts alike. There wasn’t any trick. With his radiant smile, he just presented himself, and Judaism, honestly, without pretensions. Someone once remarked that he had always assumed that to be a successful rabbi in America, a man had to be tall and sophisticated, speak the Queen’s English and hold himself aloof — until he met my father.

When, after more than 40 years of marriage, my mother died in 1989, my father was devastated. But the inner strength that saw him through so much emerged with time and he resumed his life with vigor, even marrying again. His second marriage lasted for 20 years. When my stepmother fell ill, my father cared for her, as he did for my mother, during her final illness.

He walked 3 miles daily, well into his upper 80s. In 2012, he published his memoir, “Fire, Ice, Air: A Polish Jew’s Memoir of Yeshivah, Siberia, America.” Only a brain tumor slowed him down and, eventually, ended his life.

On his last morning in this world, he made a final request. It was hard to understand him, but his daughter-in-law said she heard him say “tefillin.” When she asked him if that was what he wanted, he nodded yes, and my brother fetched my father’s tefillin and placed them on my father’s arm and on his head. It was then, after fulfilling that observance, that my father relinquished his soul.

On the final day of the Jewish week of mourning, a baby boy was born to one of our sons. At the child’s circumcision, he received his name, and a new Simcha Bunim Shafran entered the world.

(Rabbi Avi Shafran writes widely in Jewish and general media and has a Substack here. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)