In the past two decades, more than one-third of Conservative synagogues and over 20 percent of Reform have closed, according to a 2020 study by the Pew Research Center. Some congregational leaders have reached out to the Chabad movement to help their communities grow. Cathryn J. Prince reports:

Though at first reluctant, Mitchell Friedman realized the best chance of saving the synagogue he’d always considered to be “liberal Conservative” was turning it into a Chabad House.

For 88 years, the Howard Beach Judea Center occupied a sand-colored brick building on a quiet residential street in Queens just four miles from John F. Kennedy International Airport. Over time, membership dwindled and board members like Friedman began wondering how long the synagogue could remain open.

Meanwhile, a few blocks away, Rabbi Avrohom Richter and his wife Zeldi were in search of space. They’d opened a Chabad House in their home back in 2003, and while they once struggled to make a minyan, or ten-person prayer quorum, they now struggled to fit everyone inside for services.

Richter doesn’t remember who made the initial contact, but after several meetings with the board it was decided: the once-Conservative synagogue would become Orthodox.

There is another reason, I think, that the anti-Hamas demonstrations are gaining momentum, and that is the IDF’s decision to target both Hamas military commanders and members of the civilian government. By picking off the latter, it is undermining Hamas’s ability to govern, and showing that it is serious not just about achieving battlefield successes, but about ending Hamas rule in Gaza. Alas, many in the West still cling to the idea, propagated in the press for decades, that Hamas and similar groups have military and political “wings” that are entirely separate. Khaled Abu Toameh comments:

President Donald Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, said last week that he does not rule out the possibility that the Iran-backed Palestinian terror group Hamas could be politically active in the Gaza Strip after it disarms. . . . This assumption, of course, is untrue and misleading.

There is no difference between a Hamas political leader and a military commander. They all share the same extremist ideology, which does not recognize Israel’s right to exist and calls for destroying it through jihad.

Put differently, it’s not just the means employed by Hamas (terrorism, mass murder, rape, kidnapping) that are evil, but the ends as well. And that brings us back to why undermining it politically—whether done by the IDF or by Palestinian protesters—is necessary:

Hamas’s political leaders are aware that they will not be able to play any role in the Gaza Strip without the presence of their armed wing. The military wing of Hamas is crucial for the survival of the group’s political leadership. The political leaders need the military wing to control the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, as they have been doing since their violent coup there in 2007.