People of the Year 2023: East End Rabbis Are a Light in Dark Times

Since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, rabbis in the Hamptons and on the North Fork have increasingly served as steadfast beacons of unity, rallying efforts to help abroad and at home.

One day they are participating in or organizing mission trips to lend a hand on the ground in Israel. The next, they are organizing donation drives to send everything from bulletproof vests to basic necessities to refugees. Or they are leading vigils to show support for the Jewish nation or condemn the recent uptick in anti-Semitism — all the while keeping congregants abreast of loved ones who have become casualties of the conflict.

“What came out of this whole tragedy is that we might be the smallest nation, but we are the largest family,” said Rabbi Aizik Baumgarten of Chabad of Montauk, whose congregants recently sent their fourth shipment of supplies to Israel. “It seems cliché, at least it did when I first heard it, but it’s very, very true. The way that we’ve come together is literally like a family. We didn’t know each other in that sense, but we really are one.”

His community at the tip of the South Fork became a flashpoint in anti-Semtism’s resurgence, with a Montauk resident recently being charged with spray-painting swastikas and other anti-Semitic messages across the area — including on Jewish-owned businesses.

“It feels like I’m living Kristallnacht in 2023,” Rabbi Josh Franklin of the Jewish Center of the Hamptons wrote of helping clean up the graffiti. Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, was the Nazi-led campaign to smash the windows of businesses owned by Jews in 1938, one of the precursors to the Holocaust in which the Nazis systematically killed 7 million Jews and others.

Franklin is among those who have traveled to Israel since the outbreak of the war. In a recent story in Dan’s Papers, he recounted that his most important accomplishment while there was consoling the family members of the hundreds of Israelis kidnapped by the terrorist group Hamas during the October 7 attacks on Israel.

“At a rally in Tel Aviv, I listened to parents and grandparents give a quivering voice to what they imagined their children must be enduring as they lay bound in the lair of monsters,” he wrote. “One father of a 12-year-old girl thanked God that his daughter was murdered on October 7, because he couldn’t fathom the psychological, emotional and spiritual torment his daughter would have endured as a hostage in the pit of Gaza.”

Sara Bloom, president of the Congregation Tifereth Israel in Greenport, said their rabbi is currently in Israel checking on his family and on a mission sponsored by the Rabbinical Assembly to provide help and guidance to Israeli families still struggling physically and spiritually in the aftermath of the October terrorist attacks.

Rabbi Berel Lerman of the Center for Jewish Life in Sag Harbor said that a member of his congregation recently hosted an Israeli family displaced by the war. The family was scheduled to hold their son’s bar mitzvah the weekend after the war broke out, but canceled the event and fled the country instead. In an ironic twist of fate, the center wound up hosting the boy’s rite of passage.

“It’s interesting, usually people travel to Israel to have their bar mitzvah, not reverse to New York,” he said.

Lerman added that a congregant’s son, who was shot in Gaza while serving in the Israel Defense Forces, is recovering in a hospital in Tel Aviv. The center will be hosting an event to share an update on the war and the soldier’s condition at 11:30 a.m. Saturday, December 30, he said.

Despite all of the bloodshed, Rabbi Rafe Konikov of the Southampton Jewish Center has found hope in the tremendous outpouring of support he’s seen.

“Many people from the community itself … have come to visit me at the synagogue, or see me on Main Streetor, Agawam Park or Coopers Beach. I have people handing me envelopes with checks, envelopes with all amounts of cash to help the families of southern Israel,” he said.

Rabbi Jan Uhrbach of The Bridge Shul in Bridgehampton hopes progress can be made not just in ending the violence, but also the misinformation that often accompanies it.

“The misunderstandings, outright lies, and ignorance of the most basic facts about this conflict are legion,” Uhrbach said. “It’s beyond frustrating. The most fundamental misunderstanding is that this is a simple story of clear right and wrong, oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized. People want it to be that kind of story, because they want to know who to root for, or because they have an ideology that they need to fit this crisis into, or they see the suffering and pain and want to believe there’s an easy way to stop it. And, of course, some of the false narratives are driven by anti-Semitism, willfully ignoring facts or just making up lies in order to deny Israel’s right to exist or portray it as evil.

“The reality is that this is a tragic, enormously complicated conflict involving two peoples who both have longtime ties to the same piece of land, both of whom are the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of refugees, both of whom are vulnerable to the other and living in great fear of the other,” Uhrbach continued. “The leadership on both sides have made very costly mistakes, with the extremists on both sides having empowered each other. And the surrounding Arab nations have also played a major role in making this the mess that this is.”

To help, Rabbi Marc Schneier, president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding and Founding Senior Rabbi of the Hampton Synagogue, joined Imam Shamsi Ali, president of the Nusantara Foundation and spiritual leader of the Jamaica Muslim Center, in launching a series of meetings with Jewish and Muslim student leaders from many CUNY campuses to combat anti-Semitism.

“While protests and demonstrations are freedoms we cherish, there must be zero tolerance for any kind of violence against Jews in America, and no excuse for anti-Semitism,” they said in a joint statement. “We strongly and unequivocally condemn any threat to, or harm against, American Jews. Regardless of our opinions on the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, we can agree to disagree without being disagreeable.”