A local town board will allow the expansion of an eruv to encompass the towns of Quogue and Westhampton on Long Island, New York. On Tuesday night, the Southampton town board announced that it will not appeal a June 30 decision by State Supreme Court Justice Joseph Farneti, who ruled that the ritual boundary —…
Three days after a performing at a reggae festival in Spain that had previously disinvited him, Matisyahu brought his music to a synagogue near the gates of Auschwitz. The Jewish-American singer gave an intimate acoustic concert Tuesday night in the tiny Chevra Lomdei Mishnayot synagogue in Oswiecim, the town in southern Poland where Auschwitz was…
Henry Bialowas died on Saturday, age 98. I’ll miss him. There’s no reason you should recognize his name, but you should miss him too. Henry Bialowas was not a famous man. I would say, in the manner of the pre-war joke, that he was “world famous in certain districts of Poland.” He was a “fakhman,”…
Fragments of Jewish tombstones were discovered as the level of the Vistula river in Warsaw dropped during a drought. The tombstones are thought to be from the city’s Bródno Jewish cemetery. Only 300 of the cemetery’s original 3,000 graves remain, as the rest were used for construction and reinforcing the riverbanks during the Holocaust. “The…
The South Sudanese army is using Israeli weapons to fight its civil war, according to a United Nations report. A U.N. Security Council report about the conflict said that photographs showed South Sudanese officers and soldiers using the Ace, an advanced version of the Galil assault rifle, Haaretz reported Wednesday. The rifle is produced by…
The Vatican on Tuesday asked the Palestinian U.N. mission to remove all references to it from a draft resolution the Palestinians have prepared for the General Assembly calling for the flags of Palestine and the Holy See to fly at the U.N. The Palestinian draft resolution, which was seen by Reuters, says that the flags…
Israel will ask the United States government to encourage American Airlines to keep its Philadelphia-Tel Aviv flight route. American announced last week that it would discontinue the route beginning next year, solely for financial reasons. The route began flying in 2009, and has so far carried 95,000 passengers in 2015, according to Haaretz. But airline…
The president was not referring to opponents of the agreement over Iran’s nuclear program when he used the term “crazies,” a White House spokesman said. At a fundraising event in Nevada Monday, President Obama told Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid he would “deal with the crazies in terms of managing some problems.” Some interpreted…
Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner signed a bill requiring that milk not from a cow be labeled as such. The bill’s signing on Aug. 6 followed a concerted lobbying effort by the Chicago Rabbinical Council, an Orthodox rabbinical and kosher certification organization. A previous law, according to a C.R.C. press release, had allowed the sale of…
ESPN has removed Curt Schilling from coverage of the Little League World Series after the retired pitching star sent a tweet on Tuesday comparing the percentage of Muslims who are extremists to the percentage of Germans in 1940 who were Nazis. The tweet had a picture of Adolf Hitler with the text: “It’s said that…
Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie at a news conference alongside Jewish leaders including Rabbi Shmuley Boteach urged Congress to block the Iran nuclear deal. Christie, the governor of New Jersey, at the Rutgers University Chabad House in New Brunswick, New Jersey, called on Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and his state’s congressional delegation to vote against…
