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Religion & Jewish Life

Daniel Levine, fourth-generation owner of Manhattan's J. Levine Books and Judaica, says that while online booksellers such as Amazon hurt his business a decade ago, now he's been able to use the Web to boost his sales. (Alexandra Halpern)

Jewish bookstores writing new chapters in competition with Internet

Posted under Religion & Jewish Life on May 21st, 2012. Leave a Comment »

NEW YORK (JTA) – The books are in the back at J. Levine Books and Judaica. Before finding the volumes of Jewish titles at the midtown Manhattan store, customers encounter a rotating display of mezuzahs on the left, followed by shelves of kiddush cups and a rack featuring a Hebrew-language version of the wordplay game Bananagrams. [...]

Some 40,000 haredi Orthodox men filled Citi Field in New York to rally against the dangers of the Internet, May 20, 2012. (Ben Sales)

Haredim fill N.Y. baseball stadium to decry error of Internet’s ways

Posted under Religion & Jewish Life on May 21st, 2012. Leave a Comment »

NEW YORK (JTA) — The sellout crowd that filled Citi Field on Sunday night wore black and white, not the New York Mets’ blue and orange. And instead of jeering the Philadelphia Phillies or Atlanta Braves, they faced a foe that was, to hear them talk about it, far more formidable: the World Wide Web. [...]

Cleveland Browns draft Jewish lineman

Posted under Sports on May 16th, 2012. Leave a Comment »

(Cleveland Jewish News) — The Cleveland deli scene might see a new patron when Mitchell Schwartz arrives in town on Thursday, May 10, for the Cleveland Browns’ rookie minicamp. The team selected him with the 37th overall pick in last week’s NFL Draft. “Matzah ball soup or a nice deli sandwich. And of course in [...]

Orthodox rally for a more kosher Internet

Posted under Religion & Jewish Life on May 15th, 2012. Leave a Comment »

(Forward) — An upcoming haredi Orthodox mega-rally in New York about the dangers posed by the Internet has a promotional Twitter account. The event’s box office has an email address. Speeches will be live streamed. And one of the event’s organizers owns a Web marketing company specializing in search engine optimization. This isn’t your average [...]

Five steps to studying and learning from the Torah

Posted under Religion & Jewish Life on May 15th, 2012. Leave a Comment »

NEW YORK (JTA) — Observing my kids playing, I notice how the same toy, no matter how many times they play with it, can reveal the most remarkable things. My daughter, with the vocabulary befitting a 1 1/2-year-old, will bring her ball over to me and point to a mark on it with a delighted [...]

Pilgrims enjoying the Hiloula celebration at the El Ghriba Synagogue in Tunisia, May 2012.

Amid security concerns in Tunisia, a smaller Hiloula celebration

Posted under Religion & Jewish Life, World on May 14th, 2012. Leave a Comment »

DJERBA, Tunisia (JTA) — Two thousand years ago, a mysterious woman who was unable to talk arrived on this island. Every sick person she touched was healed. Although she died when her wooden house caught fire, her body remained intact and did not burn. That’s a local legend. Another is that the miracle worker is [...]

An anti-government demonstration in Budapest, December 2011. (Ruth Ellen Gruber)

Political, social turmoil worries Hungary’s Jews

Posted under News, Religion & Jewish Life, World on May 14th, 2012. Leave a Comment »

BUDAPEST (JTA) — The debate over anti-Semitism in Hungary has sharpened since the anti-Israel, anti-Jewish and anti-Roma (Gypsy) Jobbik movement entered Parliament two years ago as the country’s third largest party. Seeking scapegoats and channeling paranoia at a time of severe economic, social and political woes, Jobbik’s lawmakers regularly — and loudly — spout xenophobic, [...]

Rabbi Tamas Vero and his wife, Linda Ban Vero, outside Budapest's Frakel Leo street synagogue, where they head a growing congregation mainly made up of young families like themselves. (Ruth Ellen Gruber)

Young families bringing new life to Budapest synagogues

Posted under Religion & Jewish Life, World on May 14th, 2012. Leave a Comment »

BUDAPEST (JTA) — Linda Ban is a rebbetzin, but with a mass of curly hair and chunky rings on the fingers of both hands, she hardly fits the stereotype of a Central European rabbi’s wife. A mother of two in her mid-30s, Ban is married to Tamas Vero, the 38-year-old spiritual leader of Budapest’s Frankel [...]

Pawel Bramson, left, at the Jewish cemetary in Warsaw. (Kuba Wyszynski)

From neo-Nazi skinhead to black-hatted Jew: the journey of Pawel Bramson

Posted under News, Religion & Jewish Life, World on May 14th, 2012. Leave a Comment »

WARSAW (JTA) — Fifteen years ago, Pawel Bramson was a skinhead shouting anti-Semitic and racist slogans during soccer matches. He hated Jews and blacks – simply, he says, because you need someone to blame for what’s wrong in the world. These days he keeps kosher, wears the long beard and black hat typical of some [...]

Learning from my children — a Jewish Mother’s Day confession

Posted under Religion & Jewish Life on May 7th, 2012. Leave a Comment »

ATLANTA, Ga. (JTA) — When I was 8, I had names picked out for all of my future offspring (a dozen baby girls). At 13, I had my own babysitting business. After grad school, I was teaching a class of fourth-graders. So by the time I became pregnant with my first child — a boy, [...]