Your Daily Phil: The toll of the Oct. 7 war in numbers

Good Tuesday morning.

In today’s edition ofYour Daily Phil, we report on howColumbia University— the epicenter of last year’s anti-Israel campus protests — is gearing up this week for the start of classes. We feature an opinion piece byKaren Kolodnyadvising synagogue leaders to examine whether their facilities are an asset or a financial sinkhole.Also in this issue:Michal Leibowitz,Aimee CloseandElizabeth Leff.We’ll start with a new data review by Israel’sTaub Centerthink tank about the toll of the ongoing war.

Nearly 11 months after the Oct. 7 terror attacksand as the Israel Defense Forces has dismantled most of the military capabilities of Hamas in Gaza, more than two-thirds — 68.3% — of the 74,600 residents of southern Israel who were displaced from their homes have returned to their communities. But while their future may be profoundly difficult and daunting, they are at least able to begin planning it, to start the school year next week for their children, to find steady work,reportseJewishPhilanthropy’s Judah Ari Gross.

Not so for the more than 83% of residents of northern Israelwho have been displaced by the near-daily attacks by the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, which continues to threaten a full-scale war with Israel. They have “no idea of when they will return to their homes and their lives,” according to Nir Kaidar, director-general of the Taub Center think tank, reflecting on a new data compilation by the organization.

This long-lasting displacement has affected unemploymentamong residents of these areas accordingly, with the number of southern Israelis looking for work starting to return to pre-Oct. 7 levels, while in some cases the number of northern Israeli job-seekers is still growing.

Looking at data from the Israeli Employment Service,the Taub Center found that the southern town of Sderot saw the number of “active job-seekers” jump from approximately 800 in the months preceding Oct. 7 to a high of roughly 2,000 in January. Since January, it has crept down to just over 1,500 in July.

In the northern town of Kiryat Shmona,the number of job-seekers went from approximately 700 before Oct. 7 to some 2,300 in November after the initial evacuation. Since then, it has continued creeping up over 2,500 as of July with no indication of a change in trend.

“The unusual unemployment among evacueesrequires a variety of government responses immediately as well as a comprehensive employment plan to strengthen these communities at the end of the war,” Kaidar said.

The Taub Center also reviewedthe physical and psychological toll of the war, finding that 17,000 people have been hospitalized because of the conflict. Of these, approximately 14,000 were admitted in non-acute condition.

More than a third were hospitalized in the first month of the war,when more than 6,000 people were admitted. Since then, the numbers have ticked downward, with roughly 3,000 hospitalizations in November and December, approximately 1,500 in January and a few hundred each month since then.

The war has been primarily a burdenon the hospitals in southern and northern Israel. Nearly half of all of the hospitalizations were at either Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon, which admitted approximately 5,000 people, and Soroka Medical Center in Beersheva, which admitted roughly 3,000. The hospitals in the northern towns of Nahariya, Safed and Tiberias have collectively admitted about 2,500 patients.

Read the full report here.

Follow us on Whatsapp Follow us on Telegram CAMPUS BEAT Columbia University’s new school year starts off with disruptive anti-Israel protests Students participate in a protest in support of Palestine and for free speech outside of the Columbia University campus on November 15, 2023 in New York City. Spencer Platt/Getty Images More than 1,000 new students kicked off their freshman year at Columbia University this week. But even with all the institutional changes that took place over the summer, including the naming of a new president, several aspects at the prestigious New York school are already reminiscent of the chaos last academic year — one that was marred by occasional violent anti-Israel disruptions, amid scrutiny of university leaders for not enforcing rules that would keep Jewish students safe. Brian Cohen, executive director of Columbia Barnard Hillel,toldeJewishPhilathropy’s Haley Cohen forJewish Insiderthat he expects to see “plenty of activism again on campus, at least some of which will be highly disruptive.”

Before class:The disruptions have already started, with a week left before classes begin. At a convocation event to welcome incoming freshmen on Sunday, about 50 members of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, wearing masks and keffiyehs and holding megaphones and drums, disrupted the event from just outside of the campus gates with chants of “Free Palestine.”

Instagram infraction:As questions remain around whether the Columbia administration will crack down on disruptions from anti-Israel groups this year, outside organizations have already started doing so. On Monday, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine announced that its Instagram page had been permanently deleted. A spokesperson for Meta, the company that owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, told JI that the account was disabled for repeated violations of Meta’s dangerous organizations and individuals policies. According to Meta’spolicies, it does “not allow organizations or individuals that proclaim a violent mission or are engaged in violence to have a presence on our platforms.”

Read the full report hereandsign up forJewish Insider’s DailyKickoffhere.

Share READER RESPONDS From heritage to opportunity: Reimagining synagogue property Hans from Pixabay “Rabbi Joshua Rabin brings up an interesting point in his July article foreJewishPhilanthropy, ‘Conservative Judaism must slay its zombies,’ when he states that ‘our assets remain too tied up in dirt and insufficiently in people.’ It’s true that sometimes we focus more on thebinyan(building) and less on theminyan,” writes Karen Kolodny, a consultant in the Jewish nonprofit sector,in an opinion piece foreJewishPhilanthropy.

Infrastructure challenges: “Many of the synagogues in the U.S. were built after World War II, when we saw the growth of the Jewish population and the movement of Jewish communities to the suburbs. These buildings are aging, and that means that most of our long-established synagogues need to invest in their buildings to keep them operational, safe and compliant with evolving Americans with Disabilities Act requirements.”

Hard questions:“As we approach the High Holy Days, what metrics will synagogue leadership use to determine the future of their congregations and their facilities? For years, synagogues grappling with financial issues have focused on changing up programs and rabbis and soliciting new donors to address their financial woes. But have synagogue leaders taken a hard look at their largest asset and asked if it is maximizing its potential — or becoming a liability?”

Read the full piece here.

Share Worthy Reads Guard Your Tongue From Evil:InThe New York Times, Michal Leibowitzconsiderswhy some people attempt to abstain from gossip andlashon hara, or evil speech, and how the practice affects their lives. “Gossip — often defined as informal talk about people who are not present — is a universal feature of human culture… Except there are people out there who don’t obey nature, who try their best to deny themselves the satisfaction of that primary need, even in a world where the word ‘gossip’ is associated more with a guilty pleasure than a sin. I spoke with nearly a dozen of these people, whom I’ll call abstainers. The people I spoke with were almost entirely women… Dassy Litchman, 35, an educator and mother of five [has] spent ‘a good chunk’ of the last decade learning and teaching the Jewish laws regulatinglashon hara, or evil speech. ‘There’s almost this assumption that if you’re more intelligent, then you’re better at picking up on people’s flaws,’ Ms. Litchman told me… ‘What I’ve found in my life is that the genuinely intelligent people are the ones with enough depth to see past the obvious flaws,’ she said.”[NYTimes]

Carrying On:In theJewish Telegraphic Agency, Marcel Gascón Barberáspotlightsthe internal resilience and international support sustaining the Jewish community of Dnipro, Ukraine. “Unlike some areas of Ukraine that have remained insulated from Russian bombing, Dnipro has been relatively vulnerable throughout the war. Yet operations at the Menorah Center [one of the largest Jewish communal structures in the world] have continued unabated, allowing local Jews to live a full Jewish life in the city even during the hardest and most hopeless periods of the war and serving as a bulwark against alienation for thousands of Jews who have been displaced from towns and cities further east and south… Despite mass emigration and losing many of the sources of income that allowed it to be fully self-sufficient before the conflict, the Jewish community of Dnipro keeps running its own educational institutions, clinics, museum, conference hall, restaurant, shops, synagogue, mikvah and a school for ritual scribes.”[JTA]

Around the Web The Washington Postpublisheda list of thetop 50 megadonorscontributing to the array of PACs and other groups hoping to influence the outcome of the2024 presidential election, including Jeff and Janine Yass, Michael Bloomberg and Paul Singer…

TheJCC Mid-Westchester, N.Y., has added Michael Colen, Kate Eichel, Joanna Liebman and Gina Waldman to its board of directors…

InvestorEdgar Bronfman Jr.announcedhe has dropped his bid forParamount, leavingDavid Ellison’sSkydance Mediaas the anticipated buyer…

In theJewish Telegraphic Agency, a member ofStanding Together, the largest Arab-Jewish grassroots movement in Israel,describesthe organization’s response to the Oct.7 attacks and ongoing war…

InJewish Boston,Aimee Close, director ofStronger Together— a project ofPrizmah: Center for Jewish Day Schoolsfunded byCombined Jewish Philanthropiesand theBeker Foundation—sharesthe design process and results of a collaborative initiative to address a teacher shortage in Boston-area Jewish day schools…

School district officialsin Santa Ana, Calif.,expressedantisemitic views at steering committee meetings and conspired with hired consultants to avoid drawing the attention of the Jewish community to antisemitic content in newethnic studies courses, according to a new filing in an ongoing lawsuit…

InThe New York Times, comedianAlex Edelmanreflectson the death of his producer and close friend, Adam Brace, just weeks before the Broadway debut of the now Emmy-nominated comedy special they spent years developing together…

Film studentElizabeth Leffbasedher new comedy short,“Nonprofit,”on her experience working for the Washington, D.C.-based Reform organizationKoach…

AFinancial Timesarticle onuniversity governanceand the “weaponization” of alumni donationshighlightsthe different approaches ofJewish megadonorsin response to the anti-Israel protests and antisemitism on elite college campuses over the past year…

Pic of the Day Courtesy/Sid Jacobson JCC With his wife and kids watching from a few feet away, Dagan Cohen, director of the Randie Waldbaum Malinsky Center for Israel at the Sid Jacobson JCC in East Hills, N.Y., throws the ceremonial first pitch on Aug. 18, 2024, at Jewish Heritage Night at Fairfield Properties Ballpark.

A full-capacity crowd of 4,000 people attended the game, which also featured a message from the family of Israeli hostage Omer Neutra and a tribute to the Sid Jacobson JCC’s 16-and-under baseball team, which won the gold medal at the Maccabi Games earlier this month in Houston, Texas.

Birthdays Cody Glenn/Collision via Sportsfile Israeli-born CEO of Insitro, she was a professor in Stanford’s computer science department for 18 years, received a McArthur Genius Grant in 2004 and co-founded the online education platform Coursera,Daphne Koller…

Chatsworth, Calif., resident,Ruth Ann Kerker Hapner Board chair for North America at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies,Mark S. Freedman Author, essayist and journalist,Michael Wolff President of the Israeli Jewish Congress focused on battling antisemitism, he is a former senator in the Russian Federation,Vladimir Sloutsker President of Cornell University until eight weeks ago,Martha Elizabeth Pollack Governor of New York State since 2021,Kathy Hochul Israels ambassador to the Czech Republic,Anna Azari Director of the White House National Economic Council in the early years of the Trump administration, he was previously the president and COO of Goldman Sachs,Gary Cohn Executive director of J Street Israel,Nadav Tamir Contributing editor at theNational Interest, he is also chairman and CEO of Widehall,Steve Clemons Private equity investor and a trustee of the Jewish Federations of North America’s Board,Neil A. Wallack Co-founder of the 2017 Womens March (which she eventually left, citing concerns over antisemitism),Vanessa Wruble Portfolio manager and founder of NYC-based G2 Investment Partners,Joshua Goldberg Former director general of the Israeli Ministry of Finance, now CEO of the Strauss Group,Shai Babad Mayor of Evanston, Ill.,Daniel Kalman Biss Senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies,Richard Goldberg Director of the JCRC at the Jewish Federation Foundation of Northeast Florida in Jacksonville,Nelson France Co-founder of theSkimm,Danielle Merriah Weisberg Member of AJR, an indie pop multi-instrumentalist trio with his two brothers,Adam Metzger Michael Weiss Director of the Botanical Garden and senior lecturer at Tel Aviv University,Yuval Sapir Talia Rubin