On September 21, 2026, Rabbis for Ceasefire and Jewish Voice for Peace put Mahmoud Khalil on the pulpit at a Yizkor service in Brooklyn and called it an act of Jewish conscience. A plaque on the podium read “for the sin of genocide we atone.” Yizkor is the memorial prayer for the dead, recited on Yom Kippur. It exists to remember those who have died, including the 1,200 Jews murdered on October 7. Khalil used that pulpit to accuse Israel of genocide. He said it is “tough to repent” when “our tax dollars, our votes are being used to kill, to maim, to displace Palestinians.” That is not justice. It is not Jewish values.
Khalil is a Syrian-born Algerian national and former Columbia graduate student. He was lead organizer and spokesman for Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), the group at the center of the 2024 pro-Hamas encampments that created a documented hostile environment for Jewish students. A year before the Brooklyn service, on September 17-18, 2025, Immigration Judge Jamee Comans ordered him deported to Syria or Algeria. The court found he had “willfully misrepresented” his work for UNRWA and his campus activism on his green card application. His “lack of candor on his I-485 was not an oversight by an uninformed applicant.” UNRWA is the agency that had at least 101 staff referred for suspension or permanent banning for direct involvement in the October 7 massacre. Concealing that job was central to the fraud finding. In July 2025, CNN asked Khalil if he condemned Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. He refused, calling the question “disingenuous and absurd.” The Department of Homeland Security labeled him “a terrorist sympathizer.”
At CUAD events, Hamas propaganda was distributed, including a document titled “Our Narrative…Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” stamped Hamas Media Office. The group hosted Samidoun, a U.S. Treasury-designated terrorist organization, and Khaled Barakat, a senior terrorist leader. Video captured a CUAD protester calling on Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades to kill Jewish students. In March 2025, families of Israeli hostages and Hamas terror victims sued, calling Khalil and CUAD “Hamas’s propaganda arm in New York City.” Jewish Voice for Peace is a fringe anti-Israel activist group. It is not a synagogue and not mainstream Judaism. It uses Jewish branding as cover to put a man under a deportation order on a memorial pulpit. David M. Friedman, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, put it plainly: “I don’t think I have ever seen a greater perversion of Jewish values than the drivel emanating from this charlatan. Turning the confessional liturgy of Yom Kippur into political virtue signaling and Jew-hating libels is about as low a stunt as I have ever seen. Nauseating!”
Yizkor honors the dead. Platforming Khalil at that service does not represent Jewish conscience. It is an exploitation of Jewish grief to legitimize a man a federal judge found committed willful immigration fraud, who will not even say Hamas is wrong.
Sources
Jerusalem Post: https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-909235, Washington Free Beacon (deportation): https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/judge-orders-deportation-of-anti-semitic-columbia-activist-mahmoud-khalil, Daily Wire (deportation): https://www.dailywire.com/news/judge-orders-palestinian-activist-mahmoud-khalil-deported-to-syria-or-algeria, Fox News (deportation / UNRWA): https://www.foxnews.com/politics/immigration-judge-orders-mahmoud-khalil-deported-syria-algeria, Daily Wire (Hamas refusal): https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-admin-labels-mahmoud-khalil-a-terrorist-sympathizer-after-he-refuses-to-condemn-hamas, Breitbart (CNN interview): https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2025/07/22/watch-mahmoud-khalil-repeatedly-refuses-to-condemn-hamas-on-cnn, Washington Free Beacon (lawsuit): https://freebeacon.com/campus/columbia-activists-including-mahmoud-khalil-serve-as-hamass-propaganda-arm-in-new-york-city-lawsuit-states
