Posts By Jigsaw Digital

The album cover of Shlock Rock's "Shabbat in Liverpool," which features Beatles' songs set to Sabbath prayers and replicates the Fab Four's famed "Abbey Road" album, was released in December 2010. (Shlock Road)

STAMFORD, Conn. (JTA) — When is it kosher to listen to the Beatles on the Sabbath? When your chazan adapts the Kabbalat Shabbat Friday night service to the melodies of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Lenny Solomon, the founder of the song-parody group Shlock Rock, employed “nusach Liverpool” for… Read more »

Women demonstrating outside the Tel Aviv courtroom where former Israeli President Moshe Katsav was convicted of rape and other sex crimes, Dec. 30, 2010. (Roni Schutzer/Flash 90/JTA)

TEL AVIV (JTA) — For years it was considered an open secret in Israeli political and media circles that Moshe Katsav had a habit of sexually harassing women who worked for him. In a nation at arms with a decidedly machismo bent, sexual encounters between powerful male politicians and… Read more »

Rabbi Yossi Kaplan of the Chabad Lubavitch Center, left, and Mohammed Aziz, president of the Islamic Society of Greater Valley Forge, before Friday Muslim prayers. (Jordan Cassway)

PHILADELPHIA (Jewish Exponent) — The cars slowly turn onto the long driveway, their wheels occasionally crunching the adjacent ground frozen from the night before and speckled with a light dusting of snow. Rabbi Yossi Kaplan and Mohammad Aziz walk side by side in the direction of the oncoming line… Read more »

At a program in suburban Boston titled "Raising up the light," 50 female rabbis in the audience were called up to the bimah in tribute, Dec. 6, 2010. (Larry Sandberg)

NEWTON, Mass. (JTA) — Lynne Kern knew at 13 that she wanted to be a rabbi, even though in 1970 there were no female rabbis to act as role models. So Kern became a writer, eventually winning a Pulitzer Prize for journalism. But she never forgot her passion, and… Read more »

Texas state Rep. Joe Strauss looks set to stay in the powerful speaker's role after a broad coalition repudiated challenges based on his Judaism. (Office of Rep. Joe Strauss)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — In Texas, the Tea Party passed its first Jewish test even before its legislators had been sworn in. Deeply conservative forces in the Lone Star State firmly repudiated the effort by evangelical Christians to unseat the powerful Jewish speaker of the Texas House of Representatives because… Read more »

BUDAPEST (JTA) — The rise of Hungary’s far-right Jobbik Party has ratcheted up debate about anti-Semitism in this country and focused attention on the seeming paradoxes of Jewish life here. On the one hand, a recent article in Germany’s Der Spiegel described Budapest as “Europe’s capital of anti-Semitism,” where… Read more »

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Barack Obama

WASHINGTON (JTA) — A slight majority of Jewish Israelis has negative views of President Obama, but his supporters are more numerous than previously reported, according to a poll. The Brookings Institution poll of Jewish Israelis showed 51 percent responding with negative views of the U.S. president to 41 percent… Read more »

ASL interpreter Naomi Brunnlehrman, left, and Alexis Kashar are co-founders of the Jewish Deaf Resource Center. (Ava Kashar)

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. (JTA) — Alexis Kashar was listening intently to the speaker at a recent Jewish federation event in this New York City suburb. A closer look revealed that her eyes were trained not on the podium but on Naomi Brunnlehrman, who was seated in front of the… Read more »

Nancy Kaufman with Dean Jep Strait, left, Father Demetrios Tonias, Pastor Wesley Roberts and Bishop Gideon Thompson on a summer study tour in Israel in 2009. (Photo courtesy of Boston JCRC)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — With the prospect for the first American universal health care plan apparently dimming in Massachusetts because the three outsize personalities vital to its passage — the state’s governor, its House speaker and its Senate president — could not agree on the details, Nancy Kaufman came to… Read more »

Sylvia Barack Fishman (Courtesy of the Avi Chai Foundation)

WALTHAM, Mass. (JTA) — “Why are so many people in their 20s taking so long to grow up?” Robin Marantz Henig asked in The New York Times Magazine (“The Post-Adolescent, Pre-Adult, Not-Quite-Decided Life Stage,” Aug. 22). Lori Gottlieb urged reluctant single women to “Marry Him: The Case for Settling… Read more »

The remains of a Jewish cemetary dating back to the 16th century in the Ukrainian village of Solotyvn. Dina Kraft

SOLOTVYN, Ukraine (JTA) — On a sloping green hill tucked between small farmsteads, the mottled graves of Jews buried here since the 1600s rise up like a forgotten forest. Trudging through the mud between the tilted stones, their chiseled Hebrew lettering and renderings of menorahs sometimes barely visible, Vladimer… Read more »

Rabbi Menachem Stern, with his baby, Esther, says serving in the Army is "my calling and mission." (Mendy Chanin)

WASHINGTON (Washington Jewish Week) — Menachem Stern’s bushy black beard is at the center of a federal court case. Stern, 29, a Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi from Brooklyn, N.Y., filed suit recently against the U.S. Army saying that a no-beard restriction violates his religious freedom. In January 2009, Stern had applied… Read more »

WASHINGTON (JTA) — As far as the Nixon-Kissinger relationship goes, the March 1, 1973 tape is par for the course of their complicated relationship: hard-nosed considerations of policy leavened with Kissinger’s adoring appraisals of his boss’ genius punctuated by Nixon’s hearty encouragement of such obsequiousness. The conversation relates to… Read more »

Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, President Nixon (center) and Secretary of State Kissinger in a 1973 Oval Office meeting covered in newly released Nixon White House tapes. (White House Photo Office Collection)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — It should have been ancient, if unsavory, news: A cavalier reference to gassing Jews, an aside in a conversation nearly 40 years old. But the aside was pronounced by Henry Kissinger, a German-born Jew who fled Nazi horrors as a child and who has been honored… Read more »

From left to right, Rabbi Levi Shemtov, the director of American Friends of Lubavitch, hanging onot his hat, joins Jack Lew, the director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, and Rabbi Abraham Shemtov on a crane as Lew gets ready to light the National Menorah on the ellipse in front of the White House, Dec. 1, 2010.

WASHINGTON (JTA) – Chanukah is a story of a people standing alone to keep its lights aflame. This year in Washington, the message was of a people standing with friends — and even the not-so-friendly — to douse terrible flames. President Obama hosted the annual White House Chanukah party… Read more »

A costumed Maccabee stands at a Chanukah menorah-lighting ceremony at Berlin's Brandenberg Gate, Dec. 1, 2010. (Toby Axelrod)

BERLIN (JTA) — Icicles formed on Rabbi Yehudah Teichtal’s beard as he helped set up the towering menorah in the center of Berlin. It wasn’t just any menorah among the thousands that the Chabad-Lubavitch movement erects every Chanukah in public locations around the world. Teichtal, the Chabad rabbi in the… Read more »

At least 40 Israelis have been killed in a forest fire in northern Israel described as out of control, Dec. 2, 2010. (Flash 90)

In the aftermath of the deadliest fire in Israel’s history, Israelis this week set to the task of burying the dead, cleaning up and figuring out what exactly went wrong — and who is to blame. Even before the blaze in the Carmel Mountains near Haifa came under control… Read more »

Ethan Felson

NEW YORK (JTA) — What’s old is new, and unfortunately this holiday season, wrapped in a bow, is a boycott of things Israeli and Jewish. The relics of the past boycotts — from Nuremberg to Damascus — are back. Uninterested in reconciliation, the extremist and myopic fervor that undergirds… Read more »

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meets Egyptian Foreign Minister Aboul Gheit on May 27, 2009. Leaked State Dept. cables reveal that diplomats advised Clinton to defer to Gheit's aggrandized notion of Egypt's importance. (State Dept./Michael Gross)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — A careful reading of the WikiLeaks trove of State Department cables — which is laying bare some 250,000 secret dispatches detailing private conversations, assessments and dealmaking of U.S. diplomats — reveals a notable if perhaps surprising pattern: how often they get things wrong. Again and again… Read more »

At least 40 Israelis have been killed in a forest fire in northern Israel described as out of control, Dec. 2, 2010. (Flash 90)

JERUSALEM (JTA) — In a country always on guard to prevent the next tragedy born of terrorism or war, an out-of-control forest fire was the culprit in a tragic bus incident that left some 40 people dead in northern Israel. The bus, carrying police cadets from Israel’s prison service,… Read more »