This year, Yom Kippur services were held in five of Prague’s prewar synagogues, one of which had long ago ceased to function as a house of worship. Shira Li Bartov reports:

For the first time since World War II, one of Prague’s most historic synagogues has held a Jewish worship service. Kol Nidre, the introductory service of Yom Kippur, took place in the Klausen Synagogue, . . . ending a hiatus that lasted more than 80 years and encompassed both the murder and suppression of Czech Jewry.

Originally erected in 1573 and rebuilt after a fire in 1694, the Klausen Synagogue is the largest synagogue in Prague’s Jewish Quarter and once served as a central hub of Jewish life. It’s known as the home of several prominent rabbis and thinkers, from Judah Loew—a 16th-century talmudic scholar also known as the Maharal of Prague—to Baruch Jeitteles, a scholar associated with the Jewish Enlightenment movement of the 18th and 19th centuries.

The synagogue was reopened because a budding Prague congregation needed a larger space for its Yom Kippur services. In other words, the return to the Klausen Synagogue is a sign of the vibrancy of Czech Jewry, which stands in stark contrast to the increasingly precarious state of West European Jewry. Perhaps we are seeing a return to the situation that reigned from roughly the 14th through the 17th centuries, when Eastern Europe was more conducive to Jewish flourishing than the West.

Over the weekend, Elliot Kaufman of the Wall Street Journal reported about a formal letter, signed by five prominent sheikhs from the Judean city of Hebron and addressed to the Israeli economy minister Nir Barkat. The letter proposed that Hebron, one of the West Bank’s largest municipalities, “break out of the Palestinian Authority (PA), establish an emirate of its own, and join the Abraham Accords.” Kaufman spoke with some of the sheikhs, who emphasized their resentment at the PA’s corruption and fecklessness, and their desire for peace.

Responding to these unusual events, Seth Mandel looks back to what he describes as his favorite “‘what if’ moment in the Arab-Israeli conflict,” involving

a plan for the West Bank drawn up in the late 1980s by the former Israeli foreign minister Moshe Arens. The point of the plan was to prioritize local Arab Palestinian leadership instead of facilitating the PLO’s top-down governing approach, which was corrupt and authoritarian from the start.

Mandel, however, is somewhat skeptical about whether such a plan can work in 2025:

Yet, . . . while it is almost surely a better idea than anything the PA has or will come up with, the primary obstacle is not the quality of the plan but its feasibility under current conditions. The Arens plan was a “what if” moment because there was no clear-cut governing structure in the West Bank and the PLO, then led by Yasir Arafat, was trying to direct the Palestinian side of the peace process from abroad (Lebanon, then Tunisia). In fact, Arens’s idea was to hold local elections among the Palestinians in order to build a certain amount of democratic legitimacy into the foundation of the Arab side of the conflict.

Whatever becomes of the Hebron proposal, there is an important lesson for Gaza from the ignored Arens plan: it was a mistake, as one sheikh told Kaufman, to bring in Palestinian leaders who had spent decades in Tunisia and Lebanon to rule the West Bank after Oslo. Likewise, Gaza will do best if led by the people there on the ground, not new leaders imported from the West Bank, Qatar, or anywhere else.