JTA

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani met with a group of rabbis on Aug. 10 for roughly an hour.The rabbis’ report on the meeting differed greatly from the report of the executive director of Mamdani’s office to combat anti-Semitism, Phylissa Wisdom.

The West Bank settlement movement’s leadership joined with one of its most prominent defenders, US Ambassador Mike Huckabee, in condemning an Israeli settler outpost set up in a Palestinian family’s yard in Qusra.

The plaza that became the center of Israel’s campaign to bring home the 251 captives Hamas seized on Oct.7, 2023 is now formally called “Hostages Square,” establishing a permanent reminder of the more than two-year struggle that ended with the return of the final hostage in January, 2026.

Archaeologists have uncovered the full floor of Lithuania’s historic Great Synagogue in Vilnius, revealing treasures nearly erased by Nazi and Soviet occupations — and exposing rifts between Lithuanian Jews over how to preserve and interpret what survived.

When World Zionist Organization officials working with the Israeli Foreign Ministry opened the grave of Theodor Herzl’s grandfather on July 29 in Zemun, Serbia, they found it empty. Shimon Leib Herzl was not buried beneath his tombstone. So they kept digging to the side of his wife Rivka’s grave and found his remains there, according to Yizhar Hess, the WZO’s acting chair, who was present at the exhumation.