LIVE UPDATES: Reports, photos, and videos from today's pro-Israel rally in DC

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Haredim praying outside the White House in Washington, D.C., earlier this morning.

Shtetl Staff

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Nov 14, 2023 1:05 PM

Updated:

Nov 14, 2023 5:05 PM

From our reporters on the ground, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Washington, D.C.:

6:30 a.m.: There are 10 buses leaving from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, at Crown Street and Kingston Avenue, according to Rabbi Eliyahu Cohen. About 500 people signed up. There are three buses for men, four for women, one family bus, one for Bais Shmuel synagogue, and one for Sparks High School.

Two eleventh graders at Beis Chaya Mushka, a Chabad-Lubavitch girls high school, say this is their first time traveling to DC.

7:00 a.m.: On one of the women's buses from Crown Heights, it's mostly teenagers and young women.

“I’m looking forward to the energy and the unity and the togetherness of the Am Yisroel world,” says 20-year-old Devorie Glick of Crown Heights. Her sister, 16-year-old Gitty Glick, says she’s never been to a rally or protest before.

“It’s a rally for peace, and to fight against antisemitism, and I think that’s really important,” says 21-year-old Rivkah Weiss of Crown Heights. “Never again is today.”

8:30 a.m.: David Kirschtel, CEO of JCC Rockland County, tells Shtetl there are 22 organizations sponsoring buses to the rally, but none of those organizations are Haredi. This suggests that official Haredi support for the rally is limited.

11:00 a.m.: There are a fair number of Haredim at Biden Welcome Center in Delaware. The Crown Heights buses appear to be running behind others.

2:12 p.m.: Longtime Crown Heights resident Tzivia Jacobson, whose husband Gershon was the founder of the conservative newspaper The Algemeiner Journal, says she’s never been to Washington, D.C., before. “I’m an old lady, and everyone said, ‘you’re going?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I’m going.’”

3:00 p.m.: Rabbi Reuven Novack of Lakewood says he’s been attending protests since the 60s, when he was in the Jewish Defense League. “Am I a Zionist? I don’t know,” he says. “When you come here, it’s an expression of love for each other.”

“Oct. 7 was a massacre,” says Moshe Glixman, a Litvish man who drove to the rally from Flatbush. “We need to end that. We can’t allow anything like that to ever happen to us again. I’m unequivocally in support of Israel.”