Tagged FRONT

WASHINGTON (JTA) – Cancel your summer vacations. That was the order AIPAC’s executive director, Howard Kohr, gave his employees in a staff meeting convened this week at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee after the United States announced the Iran nuclear deal. With the influential pro-Israel lobby group pushing for Congress… Read more »

TEL AVIV (JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has decried an agreement over Iran’s nuclear program hundreds of times — most notably in a March speech to a joint session of Congress. Now that the agreement is signed, experts say Netanyahu has one way left to block it: Go… Read more »

It was under the direction of the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (commonly and lovingly referred to as “The Rebbe” by practitioners of the Chabad-Lubavitch philosophy of Judaism) in the 1950s that Chabad began setting up permanent educational and resource centers for Jewish students on university campuses… Read more »

WHITEFISH, Mont. (JTA) – Until last year, Rabbi Francine Green Roston was among the Conservative movement’s rising stars. The first woman in the movement to head a congregation with more than 500 members, Roston, the spiritual leader of Congregation Beth El in South Orange, New Jersey, also published Op-Eds… Read more »

The Tucson Jewish Community Center Fine Art Gallery will exhibit “Stitching Jewishly,” handcrafted Jewish ritual and cultural needlework by the Pomegranate Guild of Judaic Needlework, Tucson Chapter, along with “Jewish Touches of Whimsy in Paper Art and Calligraphy” by Anne Lowe from July 31 through Sept. 15. An artists’… Read more »

It is forbidden to live in a town that does not have a green garden. — Jerusalem Talmud, Kiddushin 4:12 Sustainability, growing local and urban gardens are trending. But growing your own food has been a staple of a healthy lifestyle over the last century, from the early Zionists… Read more »

The saddest event in Rabbi Richard Safran’s life was probably the death of his wife of 60 years, Lois, two years ago. “I shared everything with my life partner. Sometimes it’s overwhelming” to be alone,” says Safran, but that hasn’t stopped him from helping others navigate difficult times, or… Read more »

The Tucson Hebrew Academy 2015 trip to Israel marked the 13th such trip for the school, bringing the total of THA students who have visited Israel with their eighth grade classmates to 300. This year, 15 students along with Rabbi Billy Lewkowicz, the school’s director of Judaics/Hebrew studies, and… Read more »

Irene M. Sarver, a longtime Jewish community and civic leader, died July 6, 2015. She was 95. Mrs. Sarver served on the boards and was a member of countless organizations, including Jewish Family & Children’s Services, Hadassah, the National Council of Jewish Women, the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona,… Read more »

CHARLESTON, S.C. (JTA) — My father died a few weeks ago. The hardest part of the shiva was when it ended. Friends and family were, by and large, no longer visiting. I was alone in pain and agony. I thought of this reality during my visit to the Emanuel… Read more »

(JTA) — Whether it’s first love or night swimming, many American Jews have nostalgic memories from Jewish summer camp. For the first class of campers to attend the Union for Reform Judaism’s flagship camp in Warwick, New York, those memories just turned 50 years old. The URJ’s Kutz Camp, known… Read more »

NEW YORK (JTA) – After facing criticism for its handling of inappropriate behavior by a convert-supervising rabbi who turned out to be a mikvah-peeping voyeur, the country’s main centrist Orthodox rabbinical group has released key guidelines aimed at preventing abuses during the conversion process. The Rabbinical Council of America is recommending that would-be… Read more »

WASHINGTON (JTA) – A nuclear deal between Iran and the major world powers is due to be finalized by Tuesday. Until now, critics of the emerging deal have argued that it’s bad, getting worse, but it could be improved. Once negotiators on both sides come up with a final deal,… Read more »

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Last week’s passing of Nicholas Winton, the London stockbroker who rescued more than 600 Jewish children from the Nazis on the eve of World War II, has drawn attention to the phenomenon of ordinary individuals who risked their lives to save Jews from the Holocaust. Winton‘s… Read more »

LOS ANGELES (JTA) — It is one of the paradoxes of Arab-Jewish relations in Israel that some of the best movies depicting Palestinians as society’s outsiders are made by Jewish directors. Similarly, Palestinian directors often draw more balanced pictures of their Jewish “occupiers” than do some self-lacerating Jewish-Israeli filmmakers.… Read more »

The Jewish Community Foundation of Southern Arizona recently awarded 24 grants totaling $369,817 through its community grants program. These grants are made in three impact areas: Tucson Jewish community, Israel and global Jewry, and Tucson general community. The local Jewish and Israel grants are administered in alignment with the… Read more »

As Camp J shlichot (Israeli emissaries), Shachaf Shahar and Dar Katz are here to share their love and knowledge of Israel and Jewish culture with the campers at the Tucson Jewish Community Center this summer. Shahar, 22, is from Yad Morde­chai, a kibbutz in Tucson’s Partner­ship2Gether region in southern… Read more »

When I joined the Migrant Trail for the last day of its 12th annual week-long solidarity walk from El Sásabe, Sonora, Mexico, to Tucson, we stepped single-file along Ajo Highway in a walking meditation. Periodically, we called out names of those who had died crossing our Sonoran Desert. Some… Read more »

LONDON (JTA) — Like many European Jews, Stephen Lever has mostly stopped wearing his yarmulke on the street in recent years. A Londoner, Lever said he fears joining the hundreds of Jews accosted annually in his native United Kingdom, often by Muslim or Arab extremists seeking to exact retribution… Read more »

WASHINGTON (JTA) – From the man who married her grandmother to the man who married her daughter, from working a room full of bar mitzvah guests on behalf of her husband’s political career to headlining major pro-Israel events during her own, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s journey has never wandered far from Jews. Clinton’s Jewish encounters have… Read more »