By Gus Saltonstall
A gathering offering prayers and solidarity with Israel will take place Monday evening at the Ansche Chesed Synagogue at West 100th Street and West End Avenue, at 7 p.m. Doors will open at 6 p.m. The ceremony will include local rabbis, community members, song, and prayer. There will also be a livestream of the gathering on Ansche Chesed’s website.
Here is the full list of participating congregations and communities for the Monday evening event.
- Ansche Chesed
- B’nai Jeshurun
- Congregation Habonim
- Congregation Rodeph Sholom
- Darkhei Noam
- Hadar Institute
- Kehilat Hadar/Shaare Zedek
- Kehilat Rayim Ahuvim
- Lincoln Square Synagogue
- Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan
- Ohab Zedek
- Romemu
- SAJ
- Stephen Wise Free Synagogue
- The Jewish Theological Seminary
- West End Synagogue
- West Side Institutional Synagogue
- West Side Sephardic Synagogue
The gathering comes after Hamas launched a surprise attack Saturday morning against Israel that included thousands of rockets and the on-foot storming of dozens of towns, resulting in more than 700 Israeli deaths and many more abductions, according to reports.
Israel has since formally declared war against Hamas. You can read more and follow along with live updates — HERE.
The Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan will host a gathering space in its lobby on West 76th Street and Amsterdam this Monday through Thursday from 4 to 6 p.m., “to be together for reflection, grief, and solidarity.”
All are welcome.
“These are terrible, difficult days for Israel, for the Jewish people, and for all who love humanity,” the JCC wrote in a letter to its community. “We are broken-hearted, and we stand firmly with our brothers and sisters in Israel. May bloodshed cease, and may peace prevail.”
The letter from the JCC also mentioned that security of the building “remains a top priority” and that it has been in close contact with all levels of law enforcement to ensure the safety of the community.
You can find out more about the JCC’s plans this week on its website.
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It’s a 100 year war on Palestine – prayers & thoughts for those in Gaza as well
Why no prayers for the Palestinians who have suffered under the yoke of Israeli oppression for over 70 years?! Incarcerated in what has been aptly described as an open air concentration camp; no freedom of movement; calorie restricted; subject to continual abuse by Israeli forces. .
Israel is forcing these people into the sea! Colonizers come in and push Palestinians out of home they have occupied for generations!
Are these people supposed to succumb to genocide without fighting back?
Stop with the BS equivocating and using words like “concentration camp” or “genocide” when discussing the Palestinians. Trying to appropriate words used in association in the Holocaust is wrong. The people of Gaza put Hamas in power. Hamas has spent all of the billions in aid they have received on weapons, not on improving the quality of life for its people. Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005. Why are there still “refugee camps” 18 years later. Why isn’t their quality of life better?
How’s this for equivocating… When Egypt attacked Israel in 1967 and lost the Sinai Peninsula, Israel developed and built world class resorts (sharm el-sheik) and discovered oil all within the 12 years that they held it prior to the 1979 treaty. Why hasn’t Hamas built any infrastructure or industry for their people? Let me guess, it’s Israel’s fault. Let’s blame the Jews. The Palestinians were originally granted lands as part of the UN’s Partition Resolution which created a two-state solution. It wasn’t enough when their stated goal was to “push the Jews into the sea.” Enough with the constant victimhood. Jews have been in Israel for thousands of years, not decades. They are entitled to live in peace in their ancestral homeland.
Moreover, how can you possibly equivocate the rape of young girls, the kidnapping of children and the cold blooded murder of civilians? Where is your humanity? When did any Israeli, soldier or civilian, go into Gaza, rape their girls or murder their elderly and then post the butchering on social media for everyone to see their barbarism. How can you possibly think that Hamas’ terrorism would lead to anything other than more suffering for the people of Gaza? Hamas doesn’t care. Their only stated goal is to destroy Israel. They are terrorists and should now reap what they, and they alone have sewn.
Thanks! Thanks. Clear and concise explanation if the cruelty of Hamas. They are a guerrilla group. Criminals in military uniforms.
Thank you! I am a legal migrant, not an Arab nor a Jew and am often find the misinformation and “propaganda” to victimize Palestinians and condemn Israel appalling. Thank you for stating the facts.
The quality ofnlife hasn’t inproved since Israel left the Gaza strip in 2005 because Israel has maintained a land, air and sea blockade on Gaza since 2007.
I’m not in any way defending the attacks or the hostage taking. I do think we should all agree to the facts.
The south border has no blockade
That’s untrue. Israel left modern infrastructure in place when it left Gaza and the Palestinians immediately destroyed it.
The reason for blockades (which obviously aren’t working as well as Israel thought) is the ongoing threat of violence from Gaza directed at Israel. Hamas doesn’t want a two state solution, it wants to destroy Israel, thus putting the two places on permanent war footing.
No one said you can’t pray for Palestinians. That doesn’t change the fact that there’s no justification for murdering, kidnapping, and raping women and children.
Were flags at half staff for the 6000 Palestinians killed since 2008? Or do only “Some Lives Matter”? Gaza is a concentration camp. Calories per day are calculated at what is necessary for bare life. Electricity is a few hours a day. Escape is impossible. “When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not the ferocity” ~ CLR James
Hamas only has one goal – the destruction of Israel.
History can remember that fact too.
“Hamas launched a surprise attack….” A surprise only if one overlooks the 75-year illegal occupation of Palestine, accompanied by an illegal apartheid system, a blockade that has been declared illegal by The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the International Committee of the Red, the ongoing dispossession Palestinians’ land and homes, and other crimes against humanity.
For anyone interested and anyone who sympathized with Hamas attack – from the latest Atlantic:
“The Hamas charter of 1988 laid out a brazenly anti-Semitic mission. The charter stated: “The Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realisation of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: ‘The Day of Judgment will not come until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’” As The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, noted in 2014, “This is a frank and open call for genocide, embedded in one of the most thoroughly anti-Semitic documents you’ll read this side of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Hamas issued a new charter in 2017, which retains the group’s refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist but removes some of the boldest anti-Jewish statements from the 1988 version. However, many Hamas officials have espoused equally strong anti-Semitic statements in the years since this new charter was released.”
I’m not Jewish, but my heart goes out to the people of Israel now who suffered unfathomable acts of barbaric violence. How can history of oppression justify kidnapping of toddlers, violent killings of grandmothers and parading corpses around? Posting these savage acts on social media as if they are acts of heroism and patriotism? No, they are not. I agree that people of Palestine suffered for a long time, but this is not a fight against oppression. This is a cowardly opportunistic savage attack on the weakest members of human society.
Let’s not confuse and rationalize the barbaric savagery against women, young children, and old people Hamas has engaged in with peace-loving people whether a Palestinian or Israeli.
I cannot fathom any other attack, with even half the amount of civilian murders, let alone mass rape and kidnappings of children, that would bring out a comment section of people coming specifically to a post for people mourning the dead, in order to sympathize with and defend the attackers.
Why is it when Jews are murdered, they always deserve it?
It’s not enough for you to blame the victims in your minds, you need to seek out a space where you know mourners will be looking for information, in order to spill your own “compassion” on our pain.
I pray the hostages are brought home safely and unharmed. I pray that their captors have more empathy for the children and women they’re holding than you have for us right now.
Read Dara Horn’s and David Badiel’s recent books on Dead Jews and Jews Don’t Count respectively – both focus on these topics.
Nobody is saying we should pray for Hamas nor are they applauding the attacks. Some are suggesting praying for Palestinians. All Palestinians are not part of Hamas. All Palestinians are not terrorists.
If you can rationalize randomly killing, kidnapping, and terrorizing people in the streets and in their homes as the acts of so-called anti-colonialist freedom fighters you are anti-Semitic and full of hate, you have no understanding that multiple peoples can be indigenous to the same land, and you have an overly simplistic and immature understanding of history. We are all G-d’s children and we have to learn how to live together. #AmYisraelChai #prayforpeace
If Hamas stopped fighting there would be peace. If Israel stopped fighting there would be no more Israel. Full stop.
I’m going to try this again to see if the moderators are going to side with common sense and decency or apologists for genocide.
These attacks were against civilians living in Israel’s pre-1967 borders. But that doesn’t matter because civilians are civilians. If you characterize Palestine as being occupied for “75 years” (i.e. since 1948), characterize Israelis as settlers or colonists, or parrot idiotic phrases as “from the river to the sea” then you are an ideological fellow traveler of Hamas and you are condoning the deliberate and intentional mass murder of women and children. Shame on you.
My heart goes out to all the Israeli families who must live knowing that their civilian loved ones were murdered, raped, and attacked in such a heartless and cruel way. My heart also goes out to the American Jewish people who have to listen to equivocation about how the ends justify the means when it comes to terrorist attacks. I also am devastated for the innocent Palestinian women and children who happened to be born where they were born, as we all are, and who will suffer because of Hamas’s choice to sacrifice their lives and futures in service of the goal of eradicating Israel and Jewish lives.