Religion & Jewish Life

NEW YORK (JTA) — Rabbi Jordi Gendra feels fortunate that he found a full-time job at Temple Beth Shalom, a central Pennsylvania Reconstructionist synagogue, shortly before the recession hit. But now the 41-year-old spiritual leader is worried that the job he began in 2007 won’t last. The budget of… Read more »

Paul Ellbogen is the first name appearing on this monument to 23 soldiers killed in a battle near Modin on Sept. 24, 1948 during Israel's War of Independence. The death of his wife a few years later left their two children as orphans. (Avishai Teicher)

JTA’s new column, “Seeking Kin,” aims to help reunite long-lost friends and relatives. BALTIMORE (JTA) — The Ellbogen children, Edna and Michael, nearly became Mordechai “Moti” Malkin’s adopted siblings in early 1950s Israel. Six decades later, the 66-year-old Herzliya resident wants to know what’s become of them. When Paul… Read more »

Ben & Jerry's co-founder Jerry Greenfield recently spoke at a Jewish Federation of Greater Washington event. (Jewish Federation of greater Washington)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — A scoop of Ben & Jerry’s may taste like heaven, and for company co-founder Jerry Greenfield, the business of making ice cream has a spiritual side as well. “There is a spiritual aspect to business, just as there is to people,” Greenfield told a crowd of… Read more »

Miriam Rosenbaum (Princeton University, Office of Communications)

NEW YORK (N.Y. Jewish Week) — In the fading November light of Shabbat, Miriam Rosenbaum walked from the West Side to the East Side, and then to a building on Park Avenue where she walked up 18 flights — Shabbat had more than an hour to go — to… Read more »

LOS ANGELES (The Jewish Journal) — The USC Shoah Foundation Institute is home to more than 52,000 videotaped testimonies about the Holocaust, and people searching the archive’s index enter a single keyword into their queries more than any other: “Auschwitz.” “Auschwitz seems to be the one that people go… Read more »

Jewish leaders in Britain have outlined the process they will follow in seeking to identify a successor to the current chief rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks. (Office of the Chief Rabbi)

LONDON (JTA) — Increased transparency and the inclusion of women’s voices will be cornerstones of the process that Orthodox leaders in Britain have devised to find a replacement for the country’s longtime chief rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, who will step down in September 2013. Stephen Pack, the president of… Read more »

BALTIMORE (JTA) — Stare at the boy’s picture and be utterly charmed by that winning smirk. What a handsome child he is, so nattily dressed in a pinstriped suit, striking a perfect Bar Mitzvah portrait pose. Such dark eyes, such perfectly combed straight-back locks. His thumb tilts against his… Read more »

Ava Sarah Keyrallah was born in Paris on Oct. 31, 2011, the day the United Nations celebrated the 7 billionth child being born. (Courtesy Celine Abisror)

NEW YORK (JTA) — Could the 7 billionth person on the planet be Jewish? According to the United Nations Population Fund, the Earth welcomed its 7 billionth resident on Oct. 31. Statistically, the newborn was most likely a boy in India or China. The symbolic title was given to… Read more »

NEW YORK (Forward) — When a recent online expose revealed that women on a New York City-franchised bus were required to sit in the back, those who seemed to be least outraged were the women who actually ride the bus and live in the two heavily Orthodox Brooklyn neighborhoods… Read more »

A destroyed Jewish clothing store in Magdeburg, Germany, after Kristallnacht, Nov. 11, 1938. (H. Frederick, Hanover)

NEW YORK (JTA) — Before it was called Kristallnacht, it was known simply as “the pogrom.” Designated “the night of broken glass,” the 14-hour wave of Nazi violence on Nov. 9-10, 1938 left hundreds of Jewish storefronts and synagogues across Germany and parts of Austria in shards and splinters,… Read more »

Joshua Knobel, shown at Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan in 2007, says he wanted to "help people figure out how to live their lives with purpose and intent." (Joshua Knobel)

BALTIMORE, Md. (JTA) — When West Point’s Jewish chaplain left the academy during Joshua Knobel’s freshman year, Knobel filled in for him, running Jewish prayer services at the military school’s chapel. In the years following his 2001 graduation, Knobel led services more than 6,000 miles east while deployed in… Read more »

Version Jew.0 Is your Yiddish rusty? Want to whip up a kosher culinary masterpiece? Trying to remember which prayer to say as you cast off your sins on Rosh Hashanah? Don’t worry—there’s an app for it! Oy! Ever wonder when it’s OK to toss out an “oy”? The opportunities,… Read more »

Scott Shay in his book on energizing American Jewry says his call for a cyclical 18-year Bar/Bat Mitzvah captured the most attention on his promotional tour. (Howard Roy Katz, Art Box Studio)

NEW YORK (JTA) — Remember that 2009 episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” when as part of a plot to coax Michael “Kramer” Richards to go along with a “Seinfeld” reunion, Larry David’s African-American housemate, Leon Black, pretends to be the Jewish accountant Danny Duberstein? To sell the cover story,… Read more »

(Jewish Ideas Daily) — In the middle decades of the 20th century they were called “mushroom synagogues.” They popped up in the waning days of summer to provide High Holidays services, then disappeared at the conclusion of Yom Kippur. Today, “mushroom synagogues” are again in vogue — but with… Read more »

Alexander Soros, son of billionaire George Soros, chats with staffers and clients of the activist group Make the Road New York. (Shulamit Seidler-Feller)

NEW YORK (N.Y. Jewish Week) — Alexander Soros — what a catch! And not just for the obvious reason. Sure, papa George is worth $22 billion, and as your bubbe says, it’s as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one. But any grandmotherly… Read more »

(Sh’ma) — The third paragraph of birkat hamazon, the prayer after eating, presents an odd conflation of concerns. Opening with a petition for divine mercy toward Israel, its people, capital, temple and monarchy, the prayer veers into an anxious plea to escape material dependence on other mortals: “Do not… Read more »

SAN FRANCISCO (j. weekly) — In August, Gordon Radley tossed stones from Jerusalem over a muddy ridge in Colombia, scattered dirt from the family’s cemetery plot and recited the Jewish memorial prayer. In doing so, he kept a promise made 50 years earlier to honor the memory of his… Read more »

NEW YORK (JTA) — In 1995, Demetrio Valdez, his wife, Olive, and some of their neighbors in Conjehos County, Colo., started a kosher food co-op. “We wanted to harvest our own meat, but we couldn’t get a good price for it, so we decided to do it kosher to… Read more »

Mike Levin, seen here holding the Icelandic Jewish community's paper Torah scroll, once baked his own matzah for a Passover Seder because none was available in the country for purchase. (Alex Weisler)

REYKJAVIK, Iceland (JTA) — For Mike Levin, a native of Chicago, it took a move to Iceland to turn him into a Jewish leader. More than 25 years ago, Levin met an Icelandic woman while both were studying music at a university in Vienna. They married soon after, moved… Read more »

Newly arrived Jewish immigrants from Ethiopia attending a rehearsal for a Passover Seder at the absorption center in Mevasseret Zion, April 14, 2011. (Kobl Gideon/Flash 90)

MEVASSERET ZION, Israel (JTA) — It’s a typical Friday morning in Israel’s largest absorption center: A handful of local residents, all immigrants from Ethiopia, mill about examining wares for sale at a small, unofficial souk. Located in Mevasseret Zion, a town just outside Jerusalem, the center has become more… Read more »