and lows (and everything in between) of the year that was.

Open Hillel, the movement launched to counter the campus organi-
zation's regulations on Israel programming, holds its first national
conference at Harvard University. The two-day gathering, titled "If Not
Now, When?," draws some 350 participants for a conference aimed at
pushing back against Hillel International rules prohibiting programs
that feature groups or individuals who "delegitimize" Israel or support
the Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions movement against the Jewish
state.

Various organizations
had tables at a fair

at the Open Hillel
conference. A student

talks to an organizer
with Jewish Voice for

Peace.

Rabbi Gil Steinlauf, the senior rabbi at a large Conservative congrega-
tion in Washington, D.C., announces he is gay. The announcement is
received positively by the leadership of his synagogue, Adas Israel.

SodaStream, the Israeli at-home seltzer machine company, announces
that it will close its West Bank factory and move the facility's opera-
tions to southern Israel in 2015. The company says the move out of the
Jewish settlement of Mishor Adumim is unrelated to boycott threats.

Rabbi Gil Steinlauf says the response to his
coming out has been overwhelmingly positive.

The core exhibit of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews,
a more than $100 million complex first conceived more than 20 years
ago, is inaugurated with Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski and
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin on hand.

November 2014

As Republicans retake the Senate in midterm elections, a state senator
from New York's Long Island, Lee Zeldin, is elected to the U.S. House
of Representatives, becoming the sole Jewish Republican in Congress.

Four Jewish immigrants and a Druze policeman are killed during
morning prayer services in a terrorist attack at a Jerusalem synagogue,
Bnei Torah Kehillat Yaakov in the Har Nof neighborhood. The victims
include Rabbi Mosheh Twersky, the dean of the Torat Moshe Yeshiva
and the grandson of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the founder of mod-
ern Orthodoxy.

MIRIAM ALSTER/FLASH90

s

The core exhibit of the POLIN Museum of the
History of Polish Jews was inaugurated in

The mayor of Ashkelon is roundly criticized for laying off city Arab
workers in the aftermath of the deadly synagogue attack in Jerusalem.

continued on page 78

Warsaw, Oct. 28, 2014.

Hundreds of Israelis mourn at the funeral of

three of the victims killed earlier in a terrorist
attack on the Bnei Torah Kehilat Yaakov
synagogue in western Jerusalem, Nov. 18,

2014.

September 10 • 2015

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