Stewart Ain, an award-winning veteran journalist, covers the Jewish community. Follow him on Twitter @AinStewart or email [email protected].
Stewart Ain
By Stewart Ain
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News From Torah heists to hurricane-proof scrolls, synagogues encounter bumps on way to Torah ownership
For the past nine years, Rabbi Mitchell Nesenoff has been asking synagogues if they would donate one of their Torahs to him for use in his congregation, Temple Adat Yisrael in Lagos, Nigeria. None agreed. “When you represent a synagogue in Nigeria, people don’t believe you,” he said. “Nigeria has a terrible reputation because of…
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News ‘A small community in the hinterlands’: Meet the Jews of Tokyo
The Olympic Games begin in Tokyo July 23, but no international spectators will be permitted. It’s an unfortunate turn of events for the city’s Jewish community, said Jerry Rosenberg, a former president of the Jewish Community of Japan, an egalitarian synagogue in Tokyo. In fact, Rosenberg said the 100-family congregation “had big plans” for the…
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News How to celebrate the first Holocaust Survivors Day
The first Holocaust Survivor Day will be celebrated on Thursday to honor the world’s remaining 350,000 Holocaust survivors. Though there are three separate days each year to remember those who perished in the Holocaust, there had been none set aside for an annual recognition of survivors. Spearheaded by a group of Jewish community leaders and…
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News Japan, home to the Summer Olympics, has a rich Jewish history
As athletes converge on Japan for the Olympic Games that begin July 23, they won’t find any restaurants that serve kosher meat, but they will find a rich Jewish history dating back to the arrival of Portuguese conversos (Jews who converted to Catholicism under severe persecution) who arrived in Japan as merchants in the early…
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News When their season was cancelled by COVID, these college athletes found faith off the field
Like many Jewish college athletes, Kylie Hall had a lot of time on her hands when the COVID pandemic struck in March, 2020. The soccer player at Emory University saw games and practices cancelled. Into that void entered a campus rabbi who recruited athletes to an online educational program as a way to pass the…
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News Herbert Karliner, outspoken survivor of the SS St. Louis, dies at 94
Herbert Karliner, one of the last survivors of the ill-fated SS St. Louis, which was forced to return to Europe in 1939 after being turned away from the United States, Cuba and Canada with more than 900 Jewish refugees trying to flee Nazi Germany, died Tuesday in Aventura, Florida. He was 94. “We were so…
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News She’s single, she’s Jewish and she’s running her own farm in rural Georgia
Ever dream of just getting away from it all? Shana Frankel, has done just that by starting a farm in rural Georgia, where she lives all by herself. “Yes. I am out there all alone,” said the 28-year-old. “I do have visitors and family who come, but on a day-to-day basis it is just me…
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News How parents and rabbis are talking to kids about the rise in antisemitic attacks
As a group of Orthodox Jews walked home following Shabbat services last week in suburban Atlanta, two days after a ceasefire ended 11 days of conflict between Israel and Hamas, a man walking in another direction made the Nazi salute and yelled, “Hamas should have killed you all.” That same day, Rabbi Chaim Neiditch was…
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In Case You Missed It
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Yiddish שיִער נישט פֿאַרבאָטן׃ גאַסנשילדן אױף אַן „אומגעוווּנטשענער“ שפּראַךNearly forbidden: Street signs in an ‘unwanted’ language
אַן איניציאַטיװ צו אָנערקענען בערלינס אַמאָליקע „ייִדישע גאַס“ װעקט אױף דעם טרױם פֿון ייִדיש װי אַן אָפֿיציעלע מינאָריטעט־שפּראַך
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Fast Forward The ‘godfather of denim’ was an Italian designer whose Jewish father was murdered at Auschwitz
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Theater In a forgotten 20th century masterwork, a Holocaust story from the perpetrator’s perspective
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Fast Forward Flyers for ‘IsraelFest’ at New York high school ended up in a urinal. Now the school board president is facing calls to resign.
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