Religion & Jewish Life

NEW YORK (JTA) — Nine months ago, Natalia Demidova crouched on the second floor of her Staten Island home and watched her neighbor’s SUV race a 10-foot wave down the street. The wave crashed through Demidova’s quiet residential block in the South Beach neighborhood and flooded her home with… Read more »

NEW YORK (JTA) — When Manya Monson was laid off in 2010, she knew she wouldn’t receive unemployment benefits, but she figured she could manage. Then a few weeks later she found out she was pregnant. “It made things very tough at that point,” Monson said. Had she been… Read more »

Maksim Kats, shown in Moscow in 2012, says the campaign of Moscow mayoral candidate Alexei Navalny is about making big changes in the political life of Russia. (Maksim Kats)

MOSCOW (JTA) — On the rooftop of a Soviet-era apartment block, a young man straps into climbing gear and rappels down the side as a small gathering of city workers and police officers watch from below. On the way down, the climber stops at a balcony and tears loose… Read more »

KRASNAIYA SLOBODA, Azerbaijan (JTA) — Even at 70, Yedidia Yehuda can negotiate a narrow mountain path in northern Azerbaijan with a confidence easily mistaken for carelessness. “You take care not to fall yourself and don’t worry about me,” he tells a visitor following him toward a small town on… Read more »

"Free Spirit: Growing Up On the Road and Off the Grid" (Hyperion Books)

OAKLAND, Calif. (JTA) — I know now that my family tree is adorned with rabbis and Hebrew novelists, Yiddish auctioneers and shtetl folk healers. But as a kid, I didn’t know a thing about it. I didn’t even know I was Jewish. My mother, Claudia, pulled up her roots… Read more »

Susan Esther Barnes

 (JTA) — Susan Esther Barnes had had a rough two years. Her father’s death in April 2011 came as a shock; she hadn’t even known he had been hospitalized. And his widow’s leaving town for a week complicated plans for his funeral and burial.  As executor of his will,… Read more »

A model of the Second Temple at an exhibit of Third Temple vessels in the Temple Institute's offices in Jerusalem. (Ben Sales/JTA)

JERUSALEM (JTA) – No praying. No kneeling. No bowing. No prostrating. No dancing. No singing. No ripping clothes. These are the rules that Jews must abide by when visiting the Temple Mount, the site where the First and Second Holy Temples once stood, located above and behind the Western… Read more »

Ilya Farber during his trial in Tver, Russia, July 2013. (Zhekov.ru)

MOSCOW (JTA) — Clutching the bars of the defendant’s cage, Ilya Farber assumes the posture of a crucifix as he proclaims his innocence and pleads for freedom with characteristic thespian flare. “I implore the judge to rule in favor of the children,” the Moscow-born Jewish artist begs the court,… Read more »

Aron Berger being interviewed earlier this year outside his daughter's state-funded elementary school in Antwerp. (Cnaaan Liphshiz)

(JTA) — New government regulations are threatening the pedagogical autonomy of Antwerp’s haredi Orthodox schools and sowing division between hardliners and moderates over whether to bring the community’s school system into conformity with secular educational standards. Earlier this summer, the Flemish government issued decrees that would force both state-funded… Read more »

Happier times for Ethan Kadish, who remains critically ill in a cincinnati hospital after being hit by lightning at summer camp. (Courtesy Kadish family)

NEW YORK (JTA) — On Aug. 17, two weeks after Ethan Kadish’s 13th birthday, the members of his family gathered around a Torah scroll in the chapel of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital for a small ceremony marking his entrance into adulthood. This was not the Bar Mitzvah that Scott and… Read more »

Rabbi Uri Topolowsky and his family, seen here during a recent trip to Jerusalem, have left New Orleans and relocated to surburban Maryland. (Courtesy Uri Topolosky)

(JTA) — It didn’t take long after Rabbi Uri Topolosky moved to New Orleans in 2007 for the moderate Orthodox rabbi to win plaudits for helping the city’s Jewish community heal following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The congregation Topolosky was hired to lead, Beth Israel, had seen its building… Read more »

Sam Horowitz dancing at his Bar Mitzvah party in Dallas, November 2012. (You Tube)

(JTA) — For some boys reaching the age of Bar Mitzvah, donning a prayer shawl and reading from the Torah is exciting enough. But Sam Horowitz knew he wanted more. The Dallas teen is the star of a Bar Mitzvah video that has gone viral in the past two… Read more »

Chana Staiman visiting the building in Prague where her late father, Harry, was raised. (Courtesy Chana Staiman)

The “Seeking Kin” column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. BALTIMORE (JTA) – As a girl in Seattle, Anne Bush evinced little interest in the Holocaust, even though her father, Harry, was a survivor whose mother, sister and brother-in-law had been murdered. But as a mother in… Read more »

Handball hall-of-famer Fred Lewis, second from right, with his brother, Jack Lewis, sister-in-law, Ilene Lewis, and son, David Lewis, at the memorial to the 11 athletes murdered at the Munich Olympics in 1972, at the Wingate Institute in Netanya, Israel, site of the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame (Courtesy Fred Lewis)

  Israel hosted the world’s largest sporting event of the year this summer, the 19th Maccabiah Games, held July 17-30. Three Tucsonans participated as athletes in the Olympic-style games, which included Jewish athletes from 70 countries, while one current and one former Tucsonan were inducted into the International Jewish… Read more »

(L-R) Becky Monroy, Heather Rich and Hayley Flanigan won bronze medals with the Team Austin girls basketball team.

Thirteen teen basketball players from Tucson — 10 boys and three girls —participated in the JCC Maccabi Games in Austin, Texas, July 28-Aug. 2. The annual games for Jewish teens ages 13 to 16 are like a mini-Olympics, but with the emphasis on camaraderie and enhancing Jewish identity more… Read more »

Left to right, Juice co-organizers Inna Yampolskaya and Igor Kozlovskiy, Ukrainian Chief Rabbi Yaakov Bleich and the American Joint Distribution Committee's Lilya Vendrova at a Juice event in Kiev, November 2012. (Courtesy Juice)

KIEV, Ukraine (JTA) — Hours after assailants shot Rabbi Artur Ovadia Isakov on a street in the Russian republic of Dagestan last month, mainstream Russian media were still scrambling to ascertain his identity. But Isakov’s name and condition  already were known to the readers of Jewishnet.ru, a growing social… Read more »

NEW YORK (JTA) — Each year, when Frank Halper is faced with the state tax bill for his accounting business in Providence, R.I., he has a choice. He can write a check for the amount owed by his company or, as part of a state tax credit program, he… Read more »

Jewish communal attitudes toward interfaith marriages, like the wedding between Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan in 2012, have shifted considerably since 1990. (Allyson Magda/ Facebook)

NEW YORK (JTA) — When the nation’s largest Jewish federation convened its first-ever conference recently on engaging interfaith families, perhaps the most notable thing about it was the utter lack of controversy that greeted the event. There was a time when the stereotypical Jewish approach to intermarriage was to… Read more »

Reflecting its new motto, "Protect the Refugee," HIAS is helping refugees in Chad. (Courtesy HIAS)

TARRYTOWN, N.Y. (JTA) — The new HIAS is not your grandmother’s Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, and it’s certainly not the one that brought her mother over from the Pale of Settlement. After decades as the Jewish community’s foremost voice on immigration — first in leading the resettlement of Jews… Read more »

Hadassa Margolese walking her daughter Naama to school in Beit Shemesh a few days after Naama was harassed by haredi Orthodox men, December 2011. (Kobi Gideon/Flash90/JTA)

TEL AVIV (JTA) — Two years ago, Hadassa Margolese became a symbol of resistance to haredi Orthodox domination after she allowed her 8-year-old daughter to tell an Israeli reporter how religious men had spit on her as she walked to school. The report made headlines around the world and… Read more »