Your Daily Phil: Conservative rabbis further welcome interfaith families — but still not weddings

Your Daily Phil: Conservative rabbis further welcome interfaith families — but still not weddings

Good Thursday morning!

In today’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we speak with Rabbi David Stav, the chair of the moderate religious Zionist group Tzohar, about the divisions in Israel around religion-and-state issues. We report on the Conservative movement’s new rulings welcoming interfaith families while stopping short of having rabbis officiate their weddings, and on the low rate of approvals for federal nonprofit security grants. We feature an opinion piece by Cathy Lawi drawing attention to a gap in mental health funding in Israel, while a piece by Rabbi Nico Socolovsky focuses on the need for culturally competent mental health resources tailored to the American Jewish community. Also in this issue: Daniel R. Weiss, Andrew Gross and Frances “Fran” Belzberg.

Today’s Your Daily Phil was curated by eJP Managing Editor Judah Ari Gross, Opinion Editor Rachel Kohn and Israel Editor Justin Hayet. Have a tip? Email us here.

What We’re Watching

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel is co-hosting an antisemitism roundtable with the Anti-Defamation League to hear from Jewish community leaders about recent antisemitic incidents in the state.

What You Should Know

Among all of the other divisions and disagreements working their way through the global Jewish community, there is one that is, perhaps, less understood but whose outcome may have a tremendous impact on Israel-Diaspora relations. And that is the rift within Israel’s dati-leumi, or national-religious, community, a comparatively small portion of the Israeli public, and yet one with the potential power to reshape the country’s politics and its relationship with religion — and therefore with Diaspora Jewry.

The community has long been split. There is a more moderate faction that strives to serve as the so-called “connecting hyphen,” bridging the secular “national” world and the “religious” world. And there is a hard-line faction that brings religious fervor to nationalism, often referred to by the Hebrew portmanteau hardali, joining Haredi and leumi.

Last week, eJewishPhilanthropy’s Judah Ari Gross sat down with Rabbi David Stav, the chairman of Tzohar, a growing movement representing that more moderate faction, to discuss the future of the organization, his hopes for reforming Israel’s religious establishment and what non-Orthodox Diaspora Jews should understand about the country’s relationship with Judaism.

News

RABBINIC RULINGS

Conservative rabbis further welcome interfaith families — but keep weddings off the table

Eight months after the Conservative movement apologized to interfaith couples for treating them as if their relationships were a threat to Jewish survival, the rabbinic arm of the movement announced a new set of Jewish legal rulings to provide concrete ways congregations and rabbis can better welcome interfaith families. The reforms, however, stop short of allowing Conservative rabbis officiate at interfaith weddings, eJewishPhilanthropy’s Jay Deitcher reports.

New target audience: The goals of the changes announced in the publication titled “Gateways Into Jewish Living: Guiding the Conservative/Masorti Rabbi in Supporting Families with Non-Jewish Loved Ones” are “inspiring observance of mitzvot, inspiring study of Torah, inspiring people to seek God,” Rabbi Pamela Barmash, a co-editor, told eJP. Previously, the movement looked to households with two Jewish parents to attain these goals. “Our focus now is really on inspiring couples and families who are intermarried to live a Jewish life, to maintain an exclusively Jewish home, and if they have children, to raise Jewish children,” she said.

SECURITY CONCERN

FEMA approves only 27% of 2025 Nonprofit Security Grant applications

The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced on Wednesday that 1,600 out of 6,000 applications received for the long-delayed 2025 Nonprofit Security Grant Program cycle were approved, meaning that less than 27% of organizations that applied received any funding — a significant dip from previous years, reports Marc Rod for eJewishPhilanthropy’s sister publication Jewish Insider.

Details: The grants were approved nearly a year after applications opened for the 2025 cycle on Aug. 13, 2025, and after applications for 2026 NSGP funding were already due last week. FEMA indicated that state agencies responsible for administering the grants on the state level and repeated Department of Homeland Security shutdowns relating to immigration enforcement disputes were responsible for the delays.

Opinion

TICKING CLOCK

We’re overlooking the mental health warning signs in Israel at our peril

In an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy, Cathy Lawi, CEO of EmotionAid, writes that while the majority of public mental health resources in Israel are devoted to treating people who have already developed significant psychological conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder, the fact that an even greater number of Israeli adults and children are living with sub-clinical symptoms demands investment now.

“Some of them will recover on their own, but many will not — not because their distress is inevitable, but because nothing is currently designed to catch them before it worsens. Here is the uncomfortable math the Israeli government and funders need to sit with: it is dramatically cheaper, faster and more effective to help someone with moderate symptoms build resilience and cope than it is to treat that same person two years later once their symptoms have calcified into full-blown PTSD.”

GOOD MEDICINE

The empty shelf we should have noticed

In an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy, Rabbi Nico Socolovsky, co-editor of the Handbook of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy with Jewish American Youth (Springer, 2026), argues that successful integration need not come at the cost of acknowledging and embracing our cultural distinctiveness.

“The goal isn’t to pull Jews away from the larger society, or to reduce Jewish identity to vulnerability, or to let antisemitism become the only lens through which our young people are understood. The goal is a fuller, more accurate description of who we are: an American Jewish community that is profoundly integrated and yet meaningfully distinctive.”

Worthy Reads

Balcony View: In The Times of Israel, Daniel R. Weiss, head of school at the Bornblum Jewish Community School in Memphis, Tenn., reflects on how adaptive leadership taught him to lead from the “balcony.” “From the balcony, a school stops looking like a building with a budget and starts looking like what it actually is: a web of relationships, held together by a common belief that our children are worth this much care.”

Built to Last: In Stanford Social Innovation Review, Talia Milgrom-Elcott and Justin D’Angona argue that enduring philanthropic impact no longer requires Carnegie-style permanence and offer a five-part test for gifts built to outlast the donor. “Durability without independence is an Ozymandias, crumbling the moment a donor’s attention moves on. A catalytic spark without transferability smolders out with its initial gift. Endurance results from the compound effect of these elements.”

The Pay to Stay: In The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Rasheeda Childress writes that nonprofit leaders who raised staff pay say charities can afford it by treating wages as mission-critical, tracking turnover costs, winning board and staff buy-in and phasing raises over years. “You can’t expect people to work themselves to death wearing 50 different hats and working 65 to 80 hours a week and expect your organization to thrive.”

A Village’s Story: In The Forward, Benyamin Cohen traces how an Illinois farmer’s inherited Holocaust story widened from private family memory into a village’s shared inheritance, following Nik Jakobs to the Dutch town that saved his grandmother. “He came thinking the story belonged to his family. He left knowing it belonged to a village.”

Major G