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Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt was the Life/Features editor at the Forward. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Salon, and Tablet, among others.
Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt was the Life/Features editor at the Forward. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Salon, and Tablet, among others.
Our Purim plans are hanging in mid-air right now, thanks to coronavirus. Our school’s Purim carnival was canceled, and while services are still on and school is open — the anxiety is high. Definitely no bobbing for apples this year. With some New York-area Jewish day schools closing in recent days, there’s a lot of…
Welcome to OUR TIME, a new monthly newsletter by and for Jewish women – an eclectic mix of inspiration for mind, body, soul and heart. It is produced by The Forward and distributed in partnership with Hadassah. I’m your host, Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt, Life editor at the Forward. Growing up in a family of Soviet Jewish…
Don't just keep it to yourself
Sitting in her living room in Hillside, N.J., talking into an iPhone, Bracha Bard-Wigdor, 32, is schooling Orthodox Jewish women about sex. Instagram is her platform. No filters. “It is not O.K. for our children to be learning that men are predators, animals, that they have sexual urges they can’t control as boys,” she said,…
The numbers were not adding up for a New Jersey Orthodox couple in their early 30s with five children. She is a lawyer, he works in tech — two well-paying jobs. They still qualified for income-based assistance from their local yeshiva, so tuition for the three school-age kids totaled $40,000. But they knew that if…
An American rabbi who fled to Israel ten years ago after being accused of sexually abusing female relatives was arrested by Israeli police on Sunday, according to Israel’s Justice Ministry. Jewish Community Watch, a watchdog organization that tries to combat child sexual abuse within the Orthodox Jewish community, identified that man as Rabbi Gershon Kranczer,…
JERUSALEM, ISRAEL — The scene: A classroom in a building next to Jerusalem’s Great Synagogue. About twenty women in headscarves and wigs sit poring over texts. One, in the back row, is nursing an infant under a cover. At the front of the room sits Rabbi Refoel Kreuzer, looking more like an absent-minded professor than…
New Year’s Day presented America with a split-screen of Orthodox American Jewish life in 2020. A jubilant 90,000 souls gathered at the MetLife stadium on Wednesday, proudly celebrating the Talmud study which is the cornerstone of their lives. But while we listened to the words of rabbis, we were also receiving WhatsApp messages informing us…
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