Left to right, Baltimore Ravens' coach John Harbaugh, late owner Art Modell and general manager Ozzie Newsome at the Ravens training facilities, 2008. (Courtesy Baltimore Ravens) NEW YORK (JTA) — Every Sunday during the football season, a group of 30 diehard Jewish Baltimore Ravens fans suit up in purple pants, jerseys, socks, face paint and special Ravens tzitzit to watch the game together. If the game falls on a Saturday, the club gathers for a… Read more »
Jerusalemite Shlomo Achituv hopes to find the sister or some family of Sara Kucikwocz, pictured here, who was his student in their native Luniniec, Poland, but was killed in the Holocaust.. (Courtesy Shlomo Achituv) The “Seeking Kin” column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. “The Cruel Winter” How awful is winter, how awful is frost To far-off lands the sparrow has fled The animals have hidden, too, in the caves Beneath the hills and in the forest valleys The trees wrap… Read more »
(Jewish Ideas Daily) — Since the news of the Newtown massacre and its heartbreaking aftermath, an extraordinary talmudic passage has been reverberating in my mind. In answer to the speculative theological question of what occupies God all day, the Talmud, as interpreted by Rashi, declares that “there are twelve… Read more »
MARSEILLE, France (JTA) — As a soccer fan and treasurer of Maccabi France, Jean-Marc Krief is more preoccupied with his team’s legwork than with God’s work. So Krief was dismayed to learn that government officials in southern France were stripping the Marseille branch of the Jewish sports association of… Read more »
(Jewish Ideas Daily) — Although the Jewish encounter with modernity emerged out of a complex interplay of social, economic, and intellectual currents, Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86) is acknowledged as its godfather. The small-town Jewish boy who became a leading Enlightenment philosopher in Berlin not only embodied the synthesis of observant… Read more »
Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis will serve as Britain's next chief rabbi. (John Rifkin) LONDON (JTA) — Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis has big shoes to fill. Appointed this week as the 11th British chief rabbi, he will succeed Jonathan Sacks, an internationally renowned author and public intellectual who speaks frequently on moral, philosophical and theological affairs. The widespread assumption among British Jews has long… Read more »
NEW YORK (JTA) — Like many other mothers, Patti Weiss Levy’s heart broke when she heard about last Friday’s shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. The longtime Connecticut resident lives an hour away from Newtown, so she assumed she wouldn’t know anyone involved. But as details… Read more »
Interior of the restored synagogue in Jicin, Czech Republic, one of the 10 Stars locations. (Ruth Ellen Gruber) PRAGUE (JTA) — A large Jewish museum set to open in the Czech Republic in October will be a far cry from any Jewish museum in Europe. Instead of one building or a complex of exhibition halls in one city, it will be a nationwide museum comprising 10 linked… Read more »
Schoolchildren from the Haitian town of Zoranje standing outside their middle school that was built by the JDC. (Courtesy American Joint Distribution Committee) NEW YORK (JTA) — It was the poor construction. There had been many earthquakes more powerful than the one that hit Haiti nearly three years ago, and there have been many more since. But few have been deadlier. When the tremor registering 7.0 on the Richter scale struck on… Read more »
Shoshana Golan, left, a Holocaust survivor who changed her name from Rozia Beiman, reuniting in New York with Wiadyslawa Dudziak, a Pole who passed her off as a family member during the Holocaust, November 2012. (Chavie Lieber) NEW YORK (JTA) — Even though 67 years had passed since they last saw each other, Wladyslawa Dudziak and Rozia Beiman reunited as if they hadn’t missed a moment. Dudziak, 85, was flown to New York last week from Poland to meet with Beiman, whom she had saved from… Read more »
BRUSSELS (JTA) — Within hours of Israel’s assassination of a top Hamas commander, the situation room sprang into action, anticipating retaliatory attacks and preparing instructions to keep civilians out of harm’s way. No, the room wasn’t deep in a bunker beneath Jerusalem, but thousands of miles away — and… Read more »
Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, left, and Jewish Agency for Israel Chairman Natan Sharansky, right, discuss the free Soviet Jewry movement, marking the 25th anniversary of its pinnacle event The March on Washington, Nov. 12, 2012. (David Karp) BALTIMORE (JTA) — A year since its creation, the grandly named Global Planning Table remains the great white hope of the Jewish Federations of North America, which held its annual General Assembly here this week. Introduced a year ago, the GPT aims to reshape the way federations spend money… Read more »
Congressional candidate Rabbi Shmuley Boteach talking to Tenafly High School football players outside a polling station in the northern New Jersey borough, Nov. 6, 2012. (Chanie Lieber) TENAFLY, N.J. (JTA) — “Hey, are you tweeting that?” Rabbi Shmuley Boteach asks. Boteach — the self-proclaimed “America’s rabbi,” author of “Kosher Sex,” father of nine and Republican candidate for U.S. Congress — is standing on the sidewalk next to Tenafly Middle School on the morning of Election Day.… Read more »
Sarah Conley, a visitor to the "Big Food: Health, Culture and the Evolution of Eating," exhibit at the Yale Peabody museum of Natural History in New Haven, Conn., grimaces as she handles the eguivalent of five pounds of human fat while her sister, Gloria, looks on. (Yale School of Public Health). NEW HAVEN, Conn. (JTA) — What is it with Jews and food? We’re obsessed about it, but often with the wrong kind, like the large bagel we crave on the way into work — 337 calories, add another 50, plus 3 grams of saturated fat, for one tablespoon of cream… Read more »
At Mazel Academy in Brooklyn, Torah scrolls were unrolled to dry after being damaged by the floodwaters from Hurricane Sandy, Oct. 31, 2012. (Ben Harris) NEW YORK (JTA) — When Rabbi Avremel Okonov arrived Tuesday morning at the school he co-founded 10 years ago in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, the water in the basement had already receded from the high water mark. It only came up to his knees. Everywhere he looked… Read more »
With the rise of medical technology as well as the number of educated women who can support a family themselves, more single Jewish women are opting to have children on their own. (Courtesy Single Mothers by Choice) NEW YORK (JTA) — When Emily Wolper broke her engagement six years ago, she promised herself that if the time came when she felt ready to have a child and she was still single, she’d have one on her own. Now 37, Wolper, a college admissions consultant in Morristown,… Read more »
Harry Ettlinger, right, and Dale Ford, U.S. soldiers who served in the Monuments Men, are shown in 1945 or 1946 inspecting a Rembrandt self-portrait in a salt mine where the Nazis stored stolen and hidden art. (Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration) The “Seeking Kin” column aims to help reunite long-lost friends and relatives. BALTIMORE (JTA) — Like many immigrants from Germany who fought in the U.S. military during World War II, Harry Ettlinger served his adopted country by translating captured materials and interpreting during interrogations of enemy prisoners. But within… Read more »
Elie Berrebi, director of the Jewish Consistory of Marseille, at the city's Great Synagogue, Oct. 14, 2012. (Cnaan Liphshiz) MARSEILLE, France (JTA) — At a time when Jewish institutions across France resemble military fortresses for their security, entering the great synagogue and main Jewish center of this picturesque city on the Mediterranean coast is as easy as pushing open the front door. The only obstacles on a recent… Read more »
Bar-Ilan University historian Ariel Toaff being served a double-roasted goose and baked onion salad by a "medieval" waitress in Bevagna, Italy. (Ruth Ellen Gruber) BEVAGNA, Italy (JTA) — In a medieval tavern in 21st century Italy, waitresses in archaic costumes served a tepid, chalk-white substance the texture of oatmeal to tables filled with slightly skeptical diners. Sweet yet salty, and flavored with a mix of unexpectedly tangy spices, it turned out to be… Read more »
JERUSALEM (JTA) – Growing up secular in Tel Aviv, Gilad Kariv often would spend Saturdays hiking around rural Israel with his family, appreciating its nature and telling its history. But one Shabbat early in his childhood, Kariv decided to go to his neighborhood Orthodox synagogue. “To the place my… Read more »
