Rabbi Lev Baesh, center, marrying Jared and Laurie Berezin, an interfaith couple from Boston, Aug.19, 2011. (Courtesy Jared and Laurie Berezin) BOSTON (JTA) — Danny Richter and his fiancee, Lauren Perkins, have never been to a Jewish wedding. That’s about to change. This fall, the interfaith couple is planning to be married in a Jewish wedding ceremony. The wedding marks other significant firsts: It also will be the first time… Read more »
Particpants in the Hazon Cross-USA ride biking across Montana, June 2012. (Courtesy Hazon) WASHINGTON (JTA) — Eleven Jews are pedaling — and peddling — their message across the country. Joined by more than three dozen other bicyclists at segments along the way, participants in the Hazon Cross-USA Ride, a 10-week journey across America, are on a multifold mission. They are bringing attention… Read more »
Rabbinic sisterhood: Three rabbis now in Chernow family (Jewish News of Greater Phoenix) (Jewish News of Greater Phoenix) — When Ilana Mills was 16 years old she had an epiphany: “I want to be a rabbi.” At first, she worried the only reason she wanted to follow that career path was because her two older sisters had talked about becoming rabbis. “I… Read more »
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) speaks at the Jewish Museum of Florida in Miami in 2008. (Courtesy Debbie Wasserman Schultz for Congress) WASHINGTON (JTA) – When does a bimah turn into a political soapbox? The controversy last month over a Miami temple’s invitation and then disinvitation to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) — which prompted the resignation of an influential congregant who also is a Republican activist — has revived with… Read more »
Kindergarten students in yellow caps run out into the school yard to rehearse for their end of year concert at the Athens Jewish Community School. (Gavin Rabinowitz/JTA) ATHENS, Greece (JTA) – When the bell rang, the sixth-graders who had been playing basketball rushed off to a computer class. Their place in the yard at Athens’ Jewish Community School was taken by two dozen giggling 4- and 5-year -olds practicing dance steps for the year-end concert. “One,… Read more »
NEW YORK (JTA) – Steven Schwager, the CEO of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, is stepping down from the helm of the JDC on June 30. One of American Jewry’s largest charities, the JDC spends almost all of its charity dollars overseas, providing Jewish welfare, education and identity-building… Read more »
The “Seeking Kin” column aims to help reunite long-lost friends and relatives. BALTIMORE (JTA) — Three hundred people are expected to attend the upcoming reunion of Gesher, a Jerusalem-based organization that works to bridge the gap between secular and religious Israeli youths. But it will be hard to find anyone… Read more »
Rabbi Sally Priesand (Courtesy Sally Priesand) (Cleveland Jewish News) — When Sally Priesand became the first woman to be ordained a rabbi in the United States on June 3, 1972, she had no intention of being a pioneer. “I didn’t think about breaking any barriers or championing women’s rights,” Priesand told the Cleveland Jewish News… Read more »
To the outside observer, the haredi Orthodox anti-Internet rally at New York’s Citi Field may have looked uniform: a single mass of black hats, white shirts and brown beards. But the 40,000-strong crowd at the May 20 event was far from homogeneous. Yiddish speakers sat next to Anglophones. Chasidim… Read more »
Window Rock in Arizona, where the spiritual leaders of two tribes met at the Navajo Nation Museum to talk about sacred lands. (Edmon J. Rodman) LOS ANGELES (JTA) — A Reform rabbi, a Navajo medicine man and a professor walk into a museum. It sounds like the opening of a joke, but on a recent May Shabbat at Window Rock, Ariz., capital of the Navajo Nation, it’s the beginning of a cross-cultural discussion that… Read more »
(Jewish Ideas Daily) — First, the bad news: Sexual, physical, and emotional abuse occurs in Orthodox Jewish communities. Next, the worse news: Though there is no evidence that such abuse occurs more frequently among the Orthodox than in other populations, two recent front-page New York Times stories are just… Read more »
Yana Levy, left, and her husband, Harry, and their three children inside their apartment in Sofia. (Courtesy Bulgaria Office of the American Joint Distribution Committee) SOFIA, Bulgaria (JTA) — The stories – some months or years in the making — started trickling in last year. Young successful families were showing up desperate. As Bulgaria’s program director for the American Joint Distribution Committee, Julia Dandalova ran social services programs for the Jewish community’s most needy:… Read more »
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Ari Babaknia doesn’t expect that Iran’s president will ever read his four-volume series of Holocaust books written in the Farsi language. But the author says he is confident that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad knows the books exist. “I’ve done 10, 11 television interviews,” Babaknia said — interviews that… Read more »
Members of the Korean community in Israel gathered in Kfar Menachem, May 10. (Dr. Kangkeun Lee) KFAR MENACHEM, Israel (JTA) – It’s become a mainstay of Saturday nights on the Ben Yehuda Street pedestrian mall in Jerusalem. Between the crowds of Israeli revelers and American teens at the frozen-yogurt shops, a group of Koreans singing hymns vies for attention. It’s one of the most public… Read more »
Justice Gabriel Bach, the prosecutor in the trial of Adolf Eichmann, in front of the Vossius Gymnasium in amsterdam. (Cnaan Liphshiz) AMSTERDAM (JTA) — Gabriel Bach knew he was Jewish and that the Nazis were a serious threat, but at 13, leaving his new school and home in Amsterdam proved heartwrenching. What if, the boy wondered, he could stay just a few more weeks to finish the academic year? Bach… Read more »
Rabbi Alona Lisitsa, a Reform rabbi, participated in a religious council in Mevasseret Zion, a town west of Jerusalem, May 2012. (Rabbi Alona Lisitsa Facebook Page) Non-Orthodox movements continue making inroads in Israel By Mati Wagner JERUSALEM (JTA) — After a Jerusalem-area’s religious council allowed a female Reform rabbi to participate in its proceedings, some advocates of liberal Judaism in the country are hailing their inroads into the Orthodox-dominated religious infrastructure. At the beginning of May,… Read more »
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Unlike other Jewish holidays, the Torah does not specify a date for Shavuot; it is celebrated on the 50th day (seven weeks) after Passover. We moderns celebrate Shavuot on the sixth day of the Hebrew month of Sivan; in ancient times, when the first day of… Read more »
Daniel Levine, fourth-generation owner of Manhattan's J. Levine Books and Judaica, says that while online booksellers such as Amazon hurt his business a decade ago, now he's been able to use the Web to boost his sales. (Alexandra Halpern) NEW YORK (JTA) — The books are in the back at J. Levine Books and Judaica. Before finding the volumes of Jewish titles at the midtown Manhattan store, customers encounter a rotating display of mezuzahs on the left, followed by shelves of kiddush cups and a rack featuring a Hebrew-language… Read more »
Some 40,000 haredi Orthodox men filled Citi Field in New York to rally against the dangers of the Internet, May 20, 2012. (Ben Sales) NEW YORK (JTA) — The sellout crowd that filled Citi Field on Sunday night wore black and white, not the New York Mets’ blue and orange. And instead of jeering the Philadelphia Phillies or Atlanta Braves, they faced a foe that was, to hear them talk about it, far… Read more »
(Cleveland Jewish News) — The Cleveland deli scene might see a new patron when Mitchell Schwartz arrives in town on Thursday, May 10, for the Cleveland Browns’ rookie minicamp. The team selected him with the 37th overall pick in last week’s NFL Draft. “Matzah ball soup or a nice… Read more »
