
Stewart Ain, an award-winning veteran journalist, covers the Jewish community. Follow him on Twitter @AinStewart or email [email protected].

Stewart Ain, an award-winning veteran journalist, covers the Jewish community. Follow him on Twitter @AinStewart or email [email protected].
(JTA) — (New York Jewish Week via JTA) — In 1992, the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations learned that before moving to the United States, a Brooklyn potato chip salesman had participated in the liquidation of Jewish ghettos in Poland, including those in Warsaw, Lublin and Czestochowa. And there was evidence that he helped other SS…
The synagogue is a hazard, charge officials in a Cleveland suburb — with live wires hanging from the ceiling and no fire exits. Earlier this year, the city tried to shut it down. But the Aleksander Shul, an Orthodox congregation in University Heights, is fighting back in court, and last month filed a lawsuit accusing…
The mandate from the headquarters of Conservative Judaism’s youth movement is clear: the unvaccinated can’t participate in national and regional events. But that requirement conflicts with anti-mandate laws of a dozen states, including Florida, Texas and Georgia. The result for hundreds of United Synagogue Youth staff and teens caught in the middle ranges from confusion…
Jewish inmates who request cheesecake for Shavuot must get it. That’s what a three-judge federal appeals court panel unanimously ruled last week in a lawsuit filed by two Jewish prisoners who held that the vegan meals the Michigan Department of Corrections served them did not fulfill their kosher dietary needs. Cheesecake was not in the…
Following a spike in antisemitic threats, the Secure Community Network, which coordinates security for Jewish institutions nationwide, has opened a state-of-the-art command center in Chicago to monitor antisemitic threats. “We heard the message loud and clear – more needs to be done to protect the Jewish community,” said Michael Masters, national director and CEO of…
George Bodrogi, an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor from Boynton Beach, Fl., bit into an unpitted cherry three years ago and broke one of his front teeth. He lived with the pain for more than four months before he went to see a dentist As he feared, the dentist suggested an involved and expensive treatment plan that…
A New York philanthropist is giving $10 million to New York’s Temple Emanu-El to enhance its outreach to unaffiliated Jewish families and young Jewish professionals. That’s on top of the $15 million John H. Streicker gave to the Reform synagogue in 2016. Together, the gifts approach the level of some of the heftiest gifts ever…
Earlier this summer, Rabbi Joe Hample began writing a High Holiday sermon he can no longer deliver. The theme was “thank God the pandemic is receding,’” said Hample, who leads Tree of Life in Morgantown, West Virginia. “And now the pandemic is bouncing back so I have to change the sermon. I’m torn between panic…
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