In the early 1970s, the American movement to ease the plight of Jews in the USSR was in its early stages, while among British Jews there was little interest in the subject at all. Barbara Oberman, a thirty-three-year-old Jewish housewife, decided to change that, writes Abigail Klein Leichman:

[First], Oberman tried to persuade the Board of Deputies of British Jews to commit itself to helping Soviet Jews. “They more or less told me to go home and bake cakes,” she recalls. . . . In May 1971, Oberman began recruiting women brave enough to go against the grain and form a grassroots movement that came to be known as “the 35s.” The name referred not only to the approximate age and number of the women involved but also, and more importantly, to Raiza Palatnik, a thirty-five-year-old Jewish woman who had been imprisoned in an isolation cell five months earlier in Odessa.

Palatnik’s case galvanized the young mothers. Dressed in black, they demonstrated outside the Soviet embassy in London demanding Palatnik’s release, which finally happened in December 1972.

At first, the 35s were a thorn in the side of the Jewish establishment. . . . Oberman’s style of protest was headline-grabbing. For a demonstration against Soviet Communist leader Alexander Shelepin, who was in England for a visit, Oberman declared that the ladies would haunt him. Her husband’s factory made them white “ghost robes,” which they wore outside in the freezing cold. “It was raining, and the red lettering on our signs ran, and that was very effective in the photographs,” she notes.

Like many of the refuseniks whose cause she championed, Oberman eventually settled in Israel, where she lives to this day.

In the past few days, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the al-Qaeda offshoot that led the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad, has consolidated its rule in the core parts of Syria. Its leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, has made a series of public statements, sat for a CNN interview, and discarded his nomme de guerre for his birth name, Ahmad al-Shara—trying to present an image of moderation. But to what extent is this simply a ruse? And what sort of relationship does he envision with Israel?

In an interview with John Haltiwanger, Aaron Zelin gives an overview of Shara’s career, explains why HTS and Islamic State are deeply hostile to each other, and tries to answer these questions:

As we know, Hamas has had a base in Damascus going back years. The question is: would HTS provide an office for Hamas there, especially as it’s now been beaten up in Gaza and been discredited in many ways, with rumors about its office leaving Doha? That’s one of the bigger questions, especially since, pre-October 7, 2023, HTS would support any Hamas rocket attacks across the border. And then HTS cheered on the October 7 attacks and eulogized [the Hamas leaders] Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar when they were killed. They’re very pro-Palestinian.

Nonetheless, Zelin believes HTS’s split with al-Qaeda is substantive, even if “we need to be cognizant that they also aren’t these liberal democrats.”

If so, how should Western powers consider their relations with the new Syrian government? Kyle Orton, who likewise thinks the changes to HTS are “not solely a public-relations gambit,” considers whether the UK should take HTS off its list of terrorist groups:

The better approach for now is probably to keep HTS on the proscribed list and engage the group covertly through the intelligence services. That way, the UK can reach a clearer picture of what is being dealt with and test how amenable the group is to following through on promises relating to security and human rights. Israel is known to be following this course, and so, it seems, is the U.S. In this scenario, HTS would receive the political benefit of overt contact as the endpoint of engagement, not the start.