Creating safe spaces for Jewish teenagers amid rising antisemitism reports

Reports of antisemitic incidents reaching an all-time high led a local Jewish organization to reshape its goal to create a safe space for Jewish teenagers.

The Anti-Defamation League released a new report this week citing record-high numbers of antisemitic incidents in New England, showing a total of 623 recorded incidents of assault, harassment, and vandalism in the region in 2023 -- about a 200 percent increase from the year prior.

Of those 623 incidents, 351 happened after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel.

“It's very important for people from all backgrounds to understand the complex situation that our Jewish teens are in right now: they’re really struggling,” Rabbi Yudi Riesel, the Director of the NCSY/JSU Boston division, said.

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The National Council of Synagogue Youth (NCSY) is an Orthodox Jewish organization that started in the 1950s with the goal of getting Jewish youth to connect with their heritage. JSU, Jewish Student Union, is a subset of NCSY that started in the 2000s. It’s a public high school Jewish club that serves all Jewish teenagers from different backgrounds. There are hundreds of JSU and NCSY divisions – including Boston.

Yuval Levy, a senior at Brookline High School, said JSU is her place of Jewish joy.

“I was in so much pain from the war. I was grieving, and I didn’t have a community and I felt so isolated and so alone,” Levy, who has family in Israel, said. “[JSU] was a spiritual experience of just being together. I didn’t realize how much I needed that.”

The organization services about 450 students in Boston and according to their website, they service about 14,000 students with more than 350 clubs nationwide.

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“I realized that there was a place here for me to be able to embrace my Judaism,” said Reuben Setboun, a junior at Newton South High School.

Rabbi Riesel said that before the Hamas attack on Israel, JSU was a fun place where students attended events and dinners and looked forward to trips to other cities including Miami and New York, but now the organization has taken on a new meaning.

“After Oct. 7, the amount of tears I had to watch these young teens shed in school,” Riesel said. “We felt like we had to rise to the occasion.”

Brookline High School senior Gabriel Spagat said he has felt the rise in antisemitism personally.

“Most people – they look at me and they don’t see someone who has family in Israel, who is Jewish myself,” he said. “People have talked to me and have said very anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist, anti-Israel things and they expect me to agree because in their minds, I’m just an Asian kid, there’s no way I’m Jewish.”

Spagat said JSU is the only place he feels safe to talk about how he feels:

“It's given me that one small bright light of hope that things will get better.”