‘A Zionist to my core,’ says Jewish woman who spoke about hostages in prayer at Republican convention

Then, Leora Levy ascended to the dais to close out the session. The former U.S. Senate candidate from Connecticut, who is a representative from the state to the Republican National Committee, brought what seemed like an hours-long party to a whisper.

“O Lord, our God, we pray for the peace of Jerusalem, your eternal city, and for all the children of Abraham. We remember and pray for freedom for the hostages kidnapped and held so cruelly against their will,” Levy said. “Lord, please keep them in your sight and hasten the day of their freedom.”

Remembering the retired firefighter, killed in Saturday’s attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump in Butler, Pa., Levy turned to her Judaism and used a traditional phrase of mourning.

“We pray for Corey Comperatore and his family,” she said. “May his memory always be a blessing.”

JNS asked Levy what inspired her to use her time at the podium to recall the hostages taken during Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre.

“I love Israel. I am a Zionist to my core. I grew up in a very Zionist family,” Levy told JNS. “My family, my mother and her parents, survived because my grandfather was such a Zionist.”

Levy described her family being turned away at New York’s Ellis Island, destined to return to what would become the killing grounds of Lithuania.

The family was able to secure visas to Cuba “only because my grandfather could prove he was a Zionist and involved in a Zionist organization in Lithuania,” she said. That meant he qualified for refugee status based on the great danger of sending him back.

‘Not transactional’

Born in Havana, Levy was a commodities trader and has served as finance chair of the Connecticut Republican Party. She ran for Senate in 2022, with Trump’s endorsement, challenging Democratic incumbent Richard Blumenthal, but coming up short in what has become a solid Democratic foothold.

In between, Trump nominated the prolific fundraiser twice as ambassador to Chile, but the process got hung up in the Republican-controlled Senate on both occasions.

Despite early criticisms of Trump, including calling him “vulgar” and “ill-mannered” in 2016, Levy appeared to have changed her mind due to the substance of the former president’s policies, rather than his words and tone.

Trump’s documented transactional nature isn’t reflected in what Levy called his long standing support of U.S. Jews, she told JNS.

“The first time I ever saw President Trump, we were in the same events. President Trump, as a private businessman, was a strong supporter and major donor of the UJA-Federation in New York,” Levy said. “He has always supported the Jewish people, and anybody who calls it ‘transactional’ is just a naysayer—just trying to be negative and not accurate.”

“They don’t know what they’re speaking about,” she added. “I say, look at his actions.”

Levy ticked off to JNS Trump’s pro-Israel maneuvers in the White House, including brokering the Abraham Accords, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and moving of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, which Levy attended as part of the RNC delegation.

Last year, Levy led a much more somber RNC delegation to the Jewish state after Hama’s Oct. 7 terror attack. She took a group of committee members to see first-hand the devastation.

“It was so powerful and it was so moving to be there,” she told JNS, describing the delegation’s visit to Kibbutz Nir Oz. “We saw the homes that were burned. We saw the communal dining hall. I remember it vividly, and what I will never forget is the stench of death that was in that room.”

The delegation met with Knesset and Israeli Cabinet members, as well as military and intelligence officials.

“We also went to the north. We stood on a hilltop on the border, a mile away from a Hezbollah base,” Levy said. “We could see it clearly, and I assume that base is no longer there.”

Levy told JNS that in the months after Oct. 7, it’s become clearer to those around her which party supports U.S. Jewry and Israel. She brushed aside criticism of Trump for his rhetoric about insufficient loyalty of American Jews to Israel and inadequate gratitude to Trump.

The former president is saying, essentially, that U.S. Jews voting for Democrats “are not voting in your own self interest, that’s for sure,” Levy told JNS. “I can tell you empirically from my cousins and my relatives and friends, many who are Democrats and independents—are planning to vote for President Trump in this election.”

The reasons are, in part, what Levy cites as a permissive attitude toward Jew-hatred within the Democratic party—the same permissiveness from which her family suffered historically.

“Who would have thought that we would be seeing pogroms in the United States of America, in New York City, in 2024, and the Biden administration has done nothing, has not spoken out against it?” Levy said.

“They support these pro-Hamas protesters who are persecuting Jews, who are calling for another holocaust, and President Biden has not spoken out against it once,” she told JNS. “That’s why the Jewish community is going to vote for President Trump and for our Republican candidates.”