Donna Moser and Audrey Brooks Women of the Year Audrey Brooks and Donna Moser and Man of the Year Steve Kippur head the list of 2015 award winners the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona will honor at its annual meeting and awards celebration, which will be held Thursday, May 7 at 7 p.m. at… Read more »
Cantor Janece Cohen To mark Cantor Janece Cohen’s 25 years of service as a congregational cantor, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion is granting her a Doctorate of Sacred Music, Honoris Causa. On Saturday, May 9, Congregation Or Chadash will honor Cohen for this achievement with a gala dinner. Cohen has been… Read more »
American weightlifter David Berger was one of 11 members of the Israeli team killed by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. (Courtesy Barbara Berger)
Security was lax entering and leaving the 1972 Olympic Village in Munich. Barbara Berger knows this firsthand, because she was there on Sept. 3, 1972 to watch her 28-year-old brother, David Berger, an American, lift weights as a member of the Israeli Olympic team. The next morning, Berger and… Read more »
Rabbi Arthur Oleisky You may not know this, but every anniversary is (according to a tradition probably created by Hallmark) associated with a particular gift — paper for the first, tin for the 10th, diamonds for the 60th. The 85th anniversary is the diamond and sapphire anniversary. Both stones because, let’s face… Read more »
Siddhartha Mukherjee (Copyright Deborah Feingold)
Siddhartha Mukherjee, M.D., presented cancer’s story of major tragedy and future hope to more than 400 people at the Sixth Annual Cindy Wool Memorial Seminar on Humanism in Medicine at the Fox Tucson Theatre on March 31. The Pulitzer-Prize winning author of “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography… Read more »
David Siegel Tech Parks Arizona will host the Consul General of Israel, David Siegel, on April 29 from 5 to 7 p.m. at the University of Arizona Hillel Foundation, 1245 E 2nd St. Siegel’s talk will be part of a briefing on the Tech Parks Arizona Global Advantage business attraction program… Read more »
The Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona’s board development committee, chaired by Shelly Silverman, has recommended the following slate of officers for the 2015-2016 program year: Tom Warne, chair; Eric Schindler, vice chair/board development chair; Helaine Levy, vice chair; Jim Wezelman, treasurer/secretary; Kathryn Unger, immediate past chair. Nominated as directors… Read more »
The Wilshire Boulevard Temple is undergoing a restoration and expansion project that when complete will have taken more than a decade and cost nearly $200 million. Above, the synagogue's sanctuary. (Tom Bonner)
LOS ANGELES (JTA) — The time has long since passed when the Wilshire Boulevard Temple’s address on its namesake boulevard was considered glamorous. Now the surrounding blocks are the clamorous heart of Koreatown, with all its urban grit: traffic snarls, hulking office buildings, electronics shops, dentists, and banks with… Read more »
(J. weekly via JTA) — A junior at Stanford University who is running for the student senate says she faced anti-Semitic questioning from a student group whose endorsement she was seeking. During a March 13 interview in front of eight members of the university’s Students of Color Coalition, Molly… Read more »
BOSTON (JTA) – On a recent morning, a group of seventh-graders in Natick, Massachusetts, was absorbed in a video of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel’s acceptance speech of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize. “Why did he win?” asked their teacher, Tracy Sockalosky. She guided the discussion to the importance of remembrance, a… Read more »
Golda Meir, shown in January 1964, was not the world's first female prime minister. (Wikimedia Commons)
(JTA) — Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day, falls on April 23. In honor of the Jewish state’s 67th birthday, we present, in no particular order, 10 little-known aspects of its history. El Al used to fly to Tehran. Iran and Israel enjoyed mostly good relations up until the Islamic revolution… Read more »
WASHINGTON (JTA) – Hillary Clinton does not appear until 90 seconds into the two-minute video rolling out her campaign. No one among the bright and diverse array of everyday Americans in that video mentions foreign policy. Or Barack Obama. Jewish Democrats say the video released this weekend is emblematic… Read more »
National Front leader Marine Le Pen speaking with reporters following a meeting with French President Francois Hollande, Jan. 9, 2015. (Thierry Chesnot/Getty Images)
(JTA) — At 27, David Rachline is the youngest senator in the history of France’s Fifth Republic and a rising force within the country’s third largest party. A university dropout and the son of a Jewish Socialist Party activist, Rachline crushed his opponents in the 2014 mayoral elections in… Read more »
WASHINGTON (JTA) – Jewish leaders expected President Barack Obama to sell them hard on the Iran nuclear deal. Instead, participants in two White House meetings on Monday said he offered a softer pitch on how deeply he cares for Israel and the Jewish people. “He tried to explain he… Read more »
NEW YORK (JTA) — The evening before we visited Auschwitz, over pizza with a group of young people in Oswiecim, the town on whose outskirts lies that infamous symbol, one of my students approached me with tears in her eyes. Tears are hardly uncommon to visitors of sites of… Read more »
Girls study in a Jewish school in Sarcelles, France, Oct. 3, 2010. (Serge Attal/FLASH90)
.(JTA) —When mainstream French media report about Jewish schools, it’s usually not good news. Sometimes, the reports are about controversies surrounding public funding of such institutions in a country with a strong separation between religion and state. More often, the news is in the context of security around Jewish schools,… Read more »
President Barack Obama has said that Iran should be granted sanctions relief only once it begins to implement a nuclear accord. (Chip Semodevilla/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON (JTA) – Now that the outline for an Iran nuclear agreement has been released — or, more precisely, two outlines, one by Iran, the other by the Obama administration — major gaps have emerged that will need to be resolved ahead of a June 30 deadline for a… Read more »
Congregants praying at the Kadoorie Synagogue in Porto, Portugal, May 2014. (Courtesy of the Jewish community of Porto)
(JTA) — Hunched over a monument for thousands of Jews killed in a 1506 massacre in Lisbon, Danielle Karo (not her real name) felt a swelling in her eyes. To Karo, an American poet and business analyst who is descended from one of Sephardic Jewry’s greatest sages, the massacre… Read more »
LaurenElieCropped: Elie Greenberg and Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt co-created the popular instrumental Shabbat evening service ast Adas Israel Congregation in Washington. (David Polonsky)
NEW YORK (JTA) – When Rabbi Bruce Dollin first talked to the board at his Conservative synagogue about launching an alternative, singing-centered Shabbat morning service that would use musical instruments, he didn’t encounter much resistance. Over the two decades he had led the Hebrew Educational Alliance in Denver, attendance… Read more »
(JTA) – Israel and the Obama administration have stepped up their war of words over the framework agreement that aims to limit Iran’s nuclear activities in exchange for a gradual rollback of sanctions. President Barack Obama made his most detailed effort yet to persuade skeptics of the accord reached… Read more »
