JERUSALEM (JTA) — A plan to expand the Western Wall’s egalitarian prayer section received final approval, using a special regulation to authorize the work in order to make it a handicapped-accessible site. The approval was first reported late Sunday in Haaretz, which did not say when the meeting to approve the work took place. Approval…
Lawyer Alan Dershowitz thinks President Trump should be more worried about federal prosecutors in New York than about the Russia investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller. Dershowitz, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School and frequent cable news talking head, said Sunday on ABC News’s “This Week” that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the…
During a conversation about the Holocaust, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic told Sen. John McCain that he would have passed the “Anne Frank Test.” Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in The Atlantic that he talked every so often about the Holocaust with McCain, who died Saturday of brain cancer. McCain told him that all civilized people, and…
(JTA) — Russian authorities identified a suspect in the scrawling of anti-Semitic graffiti on the wall of a Jewish center in the Russian village of Lyubavichi, the cradle of the Chabad Hasidic movement. The suspect was a man from Murmansk, a city located hundreds of miles north of Lyubavichi, according to Yuri Ivashkin, the mayor…
(JTA) — The Leo Baeck Temple in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Bel Air has filed a lawsuit against the city and county over last year’s Skirball Fire. The fire, which broke out on Dec. 6, 2017, destroyed six homes and damaged 12 others, and required the evacuation of about 700 homes as well as…
(JTA) — Jewish delegates to the upcoming British Labour Party conference will be given bodyguards over fears for their safety from supporters of party leader Jeremy Corbyn. The protection also will be offered to Jewish Labour Party lawmakers, the Daily Mail reported late Saturday. The newspaper reported that the Jewish Labour Movement has held talks…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Five left-wing activists documenting illegal settlement construction said they were injured in an attack by a group of Jewish settler youth. The activists from the NGO Ta’ayush: Arab Jewish Partnership were taking photographs on Saturday in the unauthorized outpost of Mitzpe Yair, located in the South Hebron Hills. The group said in…
(JTA) — Playwright Neil Simon, known for such Broadway hits as “The Odd Couple,” “Barefoot in the Park,” and “Lost in Yonkers,” has died. Simon, who earned a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award, died overnight Saturday at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City from complications with pneumonia at the age of 91. Simon,…
(JTA) — A pocket watch with Hebrew letters on its face that belonged to a Jewish Russian immigrant who died aboard the Titanic sold at auction for $57,500. Heritage Auctions offered the pocket watch — for a starting bid of only $20,000 — at its headquarters in Dallas on Saturday in a public auction of…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — A Reform congregation has won a legal battle to build a synagogue building in the central Israeli city of Hod Hasharon. Kehillat Yonatan was founded in 2001 as an independent Progressive congregation. It is named after the son of its spiritual leader, Rabbi Michael Boyden, who moved with his family to Israel…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Two Jewish suspects have been arrested in an attack on three Israeli Arabs at a Haifa beach. One of the suspects, 23, a resident of Nesher, located next to Haifa, on Saturday was ordered placed under house arrest for three days. The second suspect, 29, also of Nesher, was arrested on Saturday…
