Religion & Jewish Life

New auburn basketball coach Bruce Pearl engulfed by adoring fans upon arriving at the Auburn University Regional Airport on his 54th birthday, March 18, 2014. (Courtesy Auburn University/Zach Bland)

BALTIMORE (JTA) — Shortly after assembling the players trying out for the American squad he’d be coaching at the 2009 Maccabiah Games, Bruce Pearl brought them to Sabbath evening services at the Heska Amuna Synagogue in Knoxville, Tenn. The passionate and gregarious Pearl, a veteran of reading the haftarah… Read more »

The central synagogue of the Abayudaya Jewish community in Uganda. Most of the 2000-member community is conservative, but a small faction has chosen to practice Orthodoxy. (Ben Sales)

NABUGOYE, Uganda (JTA) — On Fridays at sundown, the Jewish residents of this village set amid the lush hills of eastern Uganda gather in the synagogue to greet Shabbat. The room is bare, the light is dim and the Conservative prayer books are worn. But the spare surroundings do… Read more »

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Questions of personal status are among the most sensitive issues in Judaism and thus require responsible rabbinic leadership. That is one reason why there was such an outcry last year when Israel’s Chief Rabbinate refused to allow my teacher, Rabbi Avi Weiss, to vouch for the… Read more »

Newly ordained rabbis from Hebrew Union College's class of 2013 in Cincinnati celebrate with their ordination certificates outside the historic Plum Street Temple. (Janine Spang)

NEW YORK (JTA) — Dear Friend, I understand you’re thinking of becoming a rabbi. Mazel tov! Getting into a seminary shouldn’t be too hard. During the decade between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s, four consequential new rabbinical schools opened in America: the liberal Orthodox Yeshivat Chovevei Torah in Riverdale, N.Y.; the Conservative movement’s… Read more »

(JTA) — After a Polish court tossed out a government regulation permitting kosher slaughter in 2012, Poland’s $500 million ritual slaughter industry was expected to be brought to its knees. Evidence shows, however, that not only was kosher slaughter still being performed in Poland as recently as this month,… Read more »

Gary Shteyngart has "mixed" feelings about his years of Jewish day school. (Brigitte Lacombe)

 NEW YORK (JTA) — If it is true that there is no such thing as bad publicity, then Gary Shteyngart may be one of the best things to happen to the Conservative movement’s at-times-beleaguered Schechter Day School Network. Shteyngart, the Soviet Jewish immigrant writer known for acclaimed comic novels… Read more »

Owner Eddie Gottlieb, left, celebrating the Philadelphia Warriors winning the 1955-56 NBA championship. (Courtesy NBA Photos)

PHILADELPHIA (JTA) — Celeste Morello isn’t Jewish or a sports fan, and has never attended a professional basketball game. But a passion for history — particularly Philadelphia history — prompted her to seek recognition for the hoops pioneer Eddie Gottlieb. Morello succeeded last week when the Pennsylvania Historical and… Read more »

NEW YORK (JTA) — If it wasn’t clear before, it should be abundantly clear now: The Orthodox establishment will not sanction so-called partnership minyans, and it’s willing to go to the mat to fight them. In recent weeks, a flurry of articles by leading Orthodox rabbis and scholars have… Read more »

A man shoots a slingshot at national guard troops following one of the largest anti-government demonstrations yet on March 2, 2014 in Caracus, Venezuela. (John Moore/Getty Images)

 (JTA) — They left after Venezuelan secret police raided a Jewish club in 2007, and after the local synagogue was ransacked by unidentified thugs two years later. They left after President Hugo Chavez expelled Israel’s ambassador to Caracas, and when he called on Venezuela’s Jews to condemn Israel for… Read more »

Stan Fischler is flanked by producer Glenn Petraitis, left, and co-host Peter Ruttgaizer at the Nassau Coliseum set of their pregame and postgame shows. (Hillel Kuttler)

UNIONDALE, N.Y. (JTA) – As the Boston Bruins buzz the Islanders net throughout the opening period of a game at the Nassau Coliseum, Stan Fischler is standing 10 feet behind the Plexiglas to the left of New York goaltender Kevin Poulin. Fischler, a hockey broadcaster for four decades, can… Read more »

MADRID, Spain (JTA) — News that Spain is proposing to offer citizenship to the descendants of Jews expelled in the 15th and 16th centuries spread like wildfire in Israel. Within hours of the Spanish government’s announcement last month, the Israeli website Ynet published a list of family names supposedly… Read more »

Hundreds of thousands of haredi Orthodox Jews protesting a measure to draft them into the Israeli military, March 2, 2014. (Yaakov Naumi/FLASH90)

 JERUSALEM (JTA) — Beneath banners invoking historic calamities from the Egyptian enslavement to the Holocaust, hundreds of thousand of haredi Orthodox men gathered on the streets of Jerusalem to recite psalms and penitential prayers as they inveighed against an enemy they consider on par with Hitler and the ancient… Read more »

Israeli Arab children at a school in Baqa al-Gharblyye reading books from the Lantern Library, a spinoff of the Harold Grinspoon Foundation's PJ Library. (Akmal Nagnagy/Harold Grinspoon Foundation)

NEW YORK (JTA) — A Religion News Service article about the PJ Library is headlined “Free books — 10 million of them — help keep Jewish kids Jewish.” Now the foundation behind the widely lauded nine-year-old program — which distributes free books to more than 130,000 Jewish children in… Read more »

In this Nov. 24, 2013 loss to the College of Elizabeth, Yeshiva University Maccabees forward Rebecca Yoshor, No. 34, grabbed 22 rebounds, a category in which she leads the nation. (Courtesy of Yeshiva University Sports Information Office)

NEW YORK (JTA) — Watching Rebecca Yoshor in action for the Yeshiva University women’s basketball team, the skills are evident: the shotmaking, quickness, leadership and court smarts. They are skills honed in what her father describes as “fierce games” with her brothers and the neighborhood kids in the driveway… Read more »

The deli counter at Winn-Dixie's Boca Raton store is larger than that of many kosher-only supermarkets. (Uriel Heilman)

BOCA RATON, Fla. (JTA) – Stroll past the kosher section of most large supermarkets in America and you could be forgiven for thinking that Jewish diets consist mainly of jarred gefilte fish, unsalted matzahs and Tam-Tam crackers. Not so at the Winn-Dixie supermarket in this affluent South Florida suburb.… Read more »

Devorah Halberstam honored Raymond Kelly, the former commissioner of the New York Police Department at a gala dinner at the Jewish Children's Museum in May 2013. (Jewish Children's Museum)

NEW YORK (JTA) – When a 16-year-old Lubavitcher named Ari Halberstam was gunned down on the Brooklyn Bridge on March 1, 1994 by a Lebanese livery cab driver, the killing seemed to be a cut-and-dried case. The shooter, Rashid Baz, was captured the following day and confessed to police.… Read more »

Children with disabilities and their peers kayaking at the Conservative movement's Camp Ramah Wisconsin. (Courtesy National Ramah commission)

NEW YORK (JTA) — In the coming months, six young Jews with disabilities will start paid internships at major Jewish federations through a pilot program. If successful, the program will expand to communities throughout North America. In the fall, Manhattan’s first Jewish day school for children with special needs… Read more »

Members of the National Socialist Movement rally near Los Angeles City Hall on April 17, 2010. (David McNew/Getty Images)

NEW YORK (JTA) — When Abraham Foxman steps down next summer from his longtime post as national director of the Anti-Defamation League, he’ll be leaving his successor with a much brighter picture on anti-Semitism in America than when Foxman joined the organization in 1965. In an age when anti-Semitic… Read more »

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Presbyterians who engage in dialogue with Jewish groups are scrambling to undo what they say is the damage caused by a congregational study guide assailing Zionism distributed by a group affiliated with their denomination. The guide, “Zionism Unsettled,” posits that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is fueled by… Read more »

JERUSALEM (JTA) — In the years after he moved to Israel from Uruguay in 1995, Rabbi Mauricio Balter brought nearly 500 South American families to the Jewish state, some of whom settled near his home on the northern coast. A handful of the new arrivals were not Jews by… Read more »