(JTA) — In a step that further expands the opportunities for women to serve as recognized authorities in Jewish law, the Israeli Chief Rabbinate for the first time is allowing women to serve as kosher supervisors. Nine women took the Chief Rabbinate’s kosher supervision exam last week in Jerusalem. Should they pass, they would become…
(JTA) — France’s flag has three stripes, and its motto promotes three values: liberty, equality and fraternity. Now, its Jewish community — Europe’s largest — faces three threats, according to Roger Cukierman, president of the CRIF umbrella group of French Jewish organizations and a vice president of the World Jewish Congress. In an appearance at…
The Graduate and Professional Student Association at the University of New Mexico overturned a divestment resolution on the West Bank. Saturday’s vote rescinded an April 28 resolution calling on the university to divest from companies that operate in the West Bank. The vote was 10-10, with the tie broken by the meeting chair. Since the…
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will meet in London on Thursday, the U.S. State Department said, less than a month after a U.S. effort to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal collapsed. The focus of the talks is the U.S.-Palestinian relationship, the State Department said, a possible reference to whether…
The Jewish mayor of Ukraine’s second-largest city regained consciousness in an Israeli hospital following what is believed to be an assassination attempt. Gennady Kernes, who heads the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, awoke Monday at the Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa after two surgeries, Kharkov’s chief rabbi and Chabad emissary, Rabbi Moshe Moskovitz, told…
Two Palestinians were executed in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday as Israeli spies, the enclave’s Islamist Hamas government said, adding they had helped the Jewish state’s armed forces carry out lethal operations. The condemned men, one of whom was hanged and the other shot by firing squad, “provided the Occupation (Israel) with information that led…
(Haaretz) — Mango the brown bear was clearly in pain, as his keepers at Israel’s Ramat Gan Zoological Park observed some three weeks ago. He was eating well, but his walk had slowed and he clearly didn’t like getting up. Sure, there was clearly a problem, but just try asking a bear where it hurts….
British Jews increasingly support the country’s Conservative Party because they are richer than they used to be, the former mayor of London said. Ken Livingstone made the comment Monday on the BBC’s Newsnight program, during a discussion about how ethnic minorities vote. He said that income, not minority status, determined a person’s voting preference. “As…
(Reuters) — Odessa: the very name conjures up an archetypal melting pot, a balmy oasis of tolerance and diversity, as well as a tsarist port of imperial grandeur, immortalised in film. But can a city forever associated with a massacre of civilians more than a century ago now avoid becoming known as the place where…
Two founding members of the Pink Floyd rock band called on their colleagues from The Rolling Stones to cancel a concert in Israel. Roger Waters and Nick Mason made the call in an op-ed that was published Thursday on Salon.com. “Playing Israel now is the moral equivalent of playing Sun City at the height of…
With even the illusion of a peace process now dead, experts’ predictions of what will fill the vacuum range from a new intifada to continued peace and prosperity for Israel. Israel is, in other words, now on untested ground, and what the future holds is anyone’s guess. Still, some of those guessing about the new…
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