Tourists lining up outside the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam, June 15, 2015. (Lex Van Lieshout/AFP/Getty Images)
AMSTERDAM (JTA) — When Barry Vingerling asked his employers at the Anne Frank House whether it was okay for him to start coming to work wearing a kippah, he did it mostly as a courtesy. “I hadn’t expected this to be an issue,” Vingerling, 25, told the Dutch-Jewish NIW… Read more »
Rabbi Avi and Mushky Feldman with their daughters in Reykjavik, March 26, 2018. (Courtesy of Avi Feldman) REYKJAVIK, Iceland (JTA) — At a windswept harbor of this Nordic capital, a bearded man wearing a black hat dips eating utensils into the icy water while hissing from pain induced by the bitter cold. Perplexed by the spectacle, a caretaker helpfully offers to let the man and his… Read more »
Rabbi Avi and Mushky Feldman with their daughters in Reykjavik, March 26, 2018. (Courtesy of Avi Feldman)
REYKJAVIK, Iceland (JTA) — At a windswept harbor of this Nordic capital, a bearded man wearing a black hat dips eating utensils into the icy water while hissing from pain induced by the bitter cold. Perplexed by the spectacle, a caretaker helpfully offers to let the man and his… Read more »
Rabbi Julie Schonfeld speaking in Israel in 2013. (Courtesy of Schonfeld)
(JTA) — With Passover here, leaders of the Conservative movement are engaged in their own exodus. The CEOs of the movement’s rabbinic and congregational umbrella groups are both stepping down. Next month, for the first time in years, there will be a contested election for one of the top… Read more »
Daniel Knoll, on the left side of the podium with white kippah and no tallit, at a vigil for his mother at the Tournelles Synagogue in Paris, March 28, 2018. (Cnaan Liphshiz)
PARIS (JTA) – French Jews mourning a Holocaust survivor murdered in her Paris apartment welcomed the presence of France’s interior minister, Gérard Collomb, at a vigil in her memory. “We appreciate authorities’ swift action for justice and continued support,” Joel Mergui, the president of the Consistoire Jewish group, said… Read more »
Jews participating in a memorial march in Paris for Mireille Knoll, March 28, 2018. (Cnaan Liphshiz)
(JTA) — Last April, Traore Kobili threw his Jewish neighbor to her death from her third-story home in Paris while calling her a demon and shouting about Allah. French authorities waited 170 days before they declared the killing of Sarah Halimi an anti-Semitic hate crime — and that was… Read more »
Medical personnel from Hadassah Medical Center in Israel and the Ayder Comprehensive Specialized Hospital in Mekelle, Ethiopia, confer during a Hadassah team's mission in Ethiopia to perform spinal surgeries on young patients, March 2018. (Courtesy of Hadassah)
(JTA) — Israeli doctors performed surgeries to fix severe spinal deformities as part of a weeklong medical mission to Ethiopia. Eight doctors, two nurses and one physical therapist from the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem traveled on the mission last week to the city of Mekelle, in the African… Read more »
(JTA) — A former Polish politician who is the father of the country’s prime minister said that Jews during the Holocaust moved to ghettos of their own accord to get away from non-Jewish Poles. Kornel Morawiecki, a former senator whose son, Mateusz, became prime minister last year, made the… Read more »
Malcolm Hoenlein, center, with Ronald Lauder, left, at the Apollo Theater in New York, March 16, 2011. (Shahar Azran/WireImage/Getty Images)
NEW YORK (JTA) — Malcolm Hoenlein, the professional head of one of American Jewry’s most influential organizations and a board member of a large Israeli energy company, told JTA that he sees no conflict between those roles. Hoenlein is executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major… Read more »
Raed Saleh, left, a Berlin senator, and the Berlin Jewish Community's president, Gideon Joffe, hold an architect's rendering of a planned reconstruction of the Frankeluefer Synagogue. (Toby Axelrod)
BERLIN (JTA) — Raed Saleh, a Palestinian born in the West Bank, wants to rebuild a synagogue in the German capital. Now the dream of this Berlin politician is a bit closer to reality. Standing in front of the Fraenkelufer Synagogue on a chilly March morning, the senator and… Read more »
Dr. Kenneth Offit says a new study on BRCA mutations in Ashkenazi Jews will help save lives and contribute lessons for future medical testing. (Courtesy of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center)
NEW YORK (JTA) — A new study will provide free testing for three mutations that substantially increase the risk for developing breast, ovarian and prostate cancer among people with Eastern European Jewish ancestry. The BRCA Founder Outreach Study (BFOR), which was launched last week, will test 4,000 men and women in… Read more »
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks with Russian Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar, left, and Alexander Boroda, head of the Federation of Jewish Communities, during their meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow, Dec. 28, 2016. (Alexei Druzhinin/AFP/Getty Images)
(JTA) — When Boruch Gorin, a well-known rabbi in Moscow, traveled for the first time from Russia to the United States, a U.S. Customs officer asked him whether he was Russian. “I said, ‘No, I’m not Russian — I’m Jewish,’” Gorin recalled Monday, 27 years after the exchange at… Read more »
Bogdan Bialek, right, and Michal Jaskulski during a 2016 discussion in Warsaw about the film made about Bialek's interfaith efforts in Poland. (Courtesy of the makers of Bogdan's Journey)
(JTA) — The Catholic journalist Bogdan Bialek is used to being called a traitor in Poland for his commemorations of Jewish victims of a 1946 pogrom in his city of Kielce. For over a decade he has promoted awareness of and atonement for the murders, violating taboos that regard… Read more »
March of the Living participants carry Israeli flags at the former Nazi Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, April 24, 2017. (Omar Marques/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
(JTA) — Three years ago, Shaul de Malach had no problem joining fellow educators from his country on a trip to former Nazi death camps in Poland. Like tens of thousands of Israelis and Jews in the Diaspora who go on commemorative missions each year, de Malach “didn’t… Read more »
Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, right, of the Austrian People's Party and Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache of the Freedom Party give a news conference in Vienna after their first Cabinet meeting, Dec. 19, 2017. (Joe Klamar/AFP/Getty Images)
VIENNA (JTA) — Until December, Milli Segal’s main challenge as a producer of Jewish-themed events in Austria was balancing her duties at work with her hands-on approach to being a Jewish grandmother of four. As an organizer of prestigious Holocaust commemoration projects, Segal, 63, is on a first-name basis… Read more »
Sipora, a Jewish refugee from Iran, looking out the window of her daughter's Netherlands home, Feb. 15, 2018. (Cnaan Liphshiz)
UTRECHT, Netherlands (JTA) — To the dozens of revelers of this city’s main Purim party, a Jewish grandmother who cooks the event’s annual Persia-themed holiday feast is a rare communal asset. Since she immigrated to the Netherlands in 2012 from her native Iran, the soft-spoken newcomer has been volunteering… Read more »
Rabbi Avi Feldman, left, and wife Mushky are moving with daughters Chana and Batsheva to Iceland. (Chabad.org) (JTA) — The Chabad movement is sending a rabbi and his wife to Iceland, an island nation with 250 Jews where ritual slaughter of animals is illegal and circumcision is likely to be outlawed as well. Rabbi Avi Feldman, 27, of Brooklyn, New York, and his Sweden-born wife Mushky,… Read more »
Holocaust survivors protesting Poland's new bill on Holocaust rhetoric in front of the Polish Embassy in Tel Aviv, Feb. 8, 2018. (Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP/Getty Images)
(JTA) — The row between Poland and Israel about the Holocaust reached new heights this week after Poland’s prime minister said that the genocide had not only Polish, Ukrainian and German perpetrators, but Jewish ones as well. Addressing a new law that criminalizes blaming Poland for Nazi crimes, Mateusz Morawiecki said… Read more »
South Korea is hosting the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. (Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images)
(JTA) — Though the Jewish community in South Korea is small, Jews visiting the country to compete in or watch the Winter Olympic Games won’t have to skimp on kosher food or Shabbat programming. The country’s Chabad emissary is setting up a pop-up restaurant in Pyeongchang County, the site of… Read more »
Couples who married in Abidjan after having undergone conversions to Judaism, Dec. 10, 2017. (Bonita Sussman)
(JTA) — Avraham Yago, a married father of five who works as a linguistics professor at the University of Abidjan in the West African nation of Cote d’Ivoire, has visited Israel four times to learn about Judaism and practice his Hebrew. Yago, 64, grew up without any religious affiliation.… Read more »
