For American Jews divided over Israel, Yom Kippur is a test of families and community

Get RNS’ thoughtful, essential religion reporting every morning. Sign up for free!

(RNS and NPR) — Growing up in a Reform Jewish congregation, Adam loved Yom Kippur — the day of atonement and the holiest day of the Jewish year. He recalled the tables laden with salmon, bagels and kugels to break the holiday fast, and the congregation reciting the ancient words in unison.

“There’s something really beautiful about sitting in a room full of people who are all speaking the same prayer, saying the same blessings and talking about atonement and reckoning for our sins,” said Adam, who is in his late 20s.

But it’s not something he can imagine doing for Yom Kippur this year, which begins Sunday night (Sept. 20). After three years of war in Gaza, in which more than 73,789 Palestinians are estimated to have been killed, he’s not comfortable observing the holiday in Jewish congregations that continue to support Israel. 

“We are talking about atoning for our sins, and I just think, I can’t do this with people who are still silent about a genocide being carried out in our name,” said Adam, who asked that his last name not be used given the sensitive nature of the subject. Instead, he will spend this Yom Kippur observing a ritual with his local chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist group. 

Across the American Jewish community, stark divides on views on Israel are only getting more pronounced. Surveys have repeatedly shown a difference across generational lines, with younger Jews generally being less supportive of Israel than older generations.

That means divides often exist within families. According to an AP-NORC poll released in July, four in 10 American Jewish adults say they’ve disagreed with a family member over Israel, and three in 10 said they stopped talking to someone over the issue.

For Adam, that has been especially difficult.

“I think my mom is maybe the most important person in my life,” he said. “And that closeness, to have it be interrupted by something that to me feels so obvious, why can’t we just agree? And if we can’t agree, why can’t we just talk about it?” 

Thus far, they’ve struggled to do so. But even families addressing the conflict directly can find it difficult to navigate.

Rabbi Amy Eilberg, the first woman ordained in the Conservative movement, has long had a deep connection to Israel. “It was a core love in my life, Israel was — and imbued with the sacred,” said Eilberg, a San Francisco Bay Area resident.

When her daughter first talked about no longer sharing that perspective some 20 years ago, it was painful.

“It was almost sacrilege … like, how could you not love Israel?” Amy Eilberg recalled. “And then also just a sadness, a very deep sadness.”

She and her daughter, Penina Eilberg-Schwartz, who still lives near her mother and has been active in anti-Zionist organizing, spent years discussing and exploring these issues. They visited Jewish and Palestinian villages, and they felt they were becoming more ideologically aligned.

But after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel, which killed about 1,200 people and saw 251 taken hostage, and the ensuing war, it became clear that they still held very different beliefs.

“She was not ready to call for a ceasefire (in the weeks following the Oct. 7 attack). And I was really surprised,” Penina Eilberg-Schwartz said.

Amy Eilberg said, “As a rabbi, situated in a different way in community, I felt a very, very strong need to have empathy for Israelis in particular, in my community, my synagogue. And Jews who have family in Israel and have deep ties in Israel, who were in acute grief. And I felt a very strong call to empathize with them and to refrain from saying or doing things that would exacerbate their pain.”

They held different positions, but they kept in conversation — challenging each other, writing letters back and forth filled with questions and explorations, to come to a true understanding. Amy Eilberg said that while these were hard conversations, they were also very loving.

“When people would ask me, as people always did, ‘What’s giving you comfort in these days?’ or ‘What’s sustaining you in these days?’ I often said my conversations with Penina,” she said. “Because we were talking to one another in a very curious and loving way, across a line of difference — factual and ideological difference. And in my understanding, that was peace-building work.”

They continue to talk and share holidays together.

Rabbanit Dasi Fruchter, who leads the South Philadelphia Shtiebel, said talking across difference can be hard and heated. But that’s OK.

“This is not a conflict-free zone to come and be in community together,” Fruchter said. “But there are strong Jewish values around what’s called a ‘machloket l’shem shamayim,’ an argument for the sake of heaven.” 

To live up to that value, one must move beyond ego and fear and work to find the ultimate truth. And that means if you’re having this kind of argument, it’s a good thing, Fruchter said.

“It’s actually one of the really strong foundations of Jewish rabbinic life,” Fruchter said. “It just has to come from a place of wanting to reach a better world.” 

Her shul has set up, as a community, ground rules for those arguments surrounding Israel.

“ We ask that everyone in the room be committed to the flourishing of Jewish life, in both Israel and the diaspora,” she said. “We ask that everyone participate in the suffering and joy of our people. And then finally, which is really important, we ask that everyone upholds the principle of ‘b’tzelem Elohim,’ or, in Hebrew, the divine image — valuing the lives of both Jews and non-Jews alike.”

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t arguments or times when congregants need to take a break. But Fruchter said this is the sort of work they’re called to do.

“ Being together in the same room isn’t just like some exercise in pluralism or civic identity, but it is the essence of what it means to be a person in the world and in Jewish community,” she said. 

Fruchter said she also draws inspiration from the teaching that Yom Kippur is a time when the community and the divine walk toward each other — a time when Jews ask God to move from judgment to compassion. And, she said, they must try to do the same in their own lives.