(JTA) — When the main synagogue organization of Conservative Jewry gathers this weekend in Baltimore to celebrate its centennial, there will be a lot to talk about. The number of synagogues affiliated with the group, the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, is in decline. The proportion of American Jews who identify as Conservative has shrunk…
(JTA) —The first lawmaker to speak at a closed-door Capitol Hill confab convened by the Republican Jewish Coalition’s women’s affiliate was, naturally enough, a woman. So was the second. Against the background of the current federal budget battle, that’s about all that united Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.). Ayotte has been…
ODESSA, Ukraine — Investigators in Lviv are looking into claims that two policemen assaulted and urinated on a Jewish man as part of an anti-Semitic attack, Ukrainian media reported. The alleged victim, Dmitry Flekman, 28, told the Ukrainian newspaper Segondiya that two men, who identified themselves as police but did not give their names, assaulted…
(JTA) — Battered and bruised by decades of separatist governments, restrictive language laws and a modern-day exodus, the Jewish community of Quebec may finally have something to celebrate. A new analysis of figures culled from the 2011 Canadian census, known as the National Household Survey, found that Quebec’s Jewish population had not dipped below the…
Francois Englert, a Belgian Jewish professor at Tel Aviv University and a Holocaust survivor, won a share the Nobel Prize in physics. Englert and Britain’s Peter Higgs won the prize on Tuesday for predicting the existence of the Higgs boson particle that explains how elementary matter attained the mass to form stars and planets. The…
The Palestinian economy in the Israeli-occupied West Bank shrank for the first time in a decade in the first half of 2013, the World Bank said, blaming a decline in foreign aid and myriad restrictions imposed by Israel. Israel has pointed repeatedly to strong growth in the West Bank in recent years as vital to…
Israel’s higher education system is deteriorating and well-educated Israelis are fleeing abroad, according to a report recently published by the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel. The emigration rate of Israeli researchers is now the highest among Western countries, according to the study. It said that over the past 40 years, nationwide expenditure…
Two Palestinian brothers suspected of involvement in the attack on a nine-year-old girl in the settlement of Psagot were arrested by the Israel Defense Forces. The brothers, from the West Bank village of El Bireh, located several hundred yards from the girl’s home, were apprehended late Monday in the village and questioned by the IDF….
Italy’s Jewish leaders paid tribute to as many as 2,500 anti-fascist Carabinieri military police deported to death camps by the Nazis in 1943. Rome Chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni; President of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities Renzo Gattegna; and other Jewish leaders took part in a ceremony held at Carabinieri barracks in Rome on…
More than 800,000 people filled the streets of Jerusalem for the funeral of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the Sephardi sage and political leader who died at age 93. Many of Jerusalem’s main streets were closed for Monday’s funeral, which is being called by local media the largest funeral in Israeli’s history. The attendees, equal to about…
The kind of basic science that helped Randy Schekman win the coveted Nobel medicine prize might never have been funded if he had applied today. Schekman, along with two other U.S.-based winners of the 2013 medicine prize, Thomas Suedhof and James Rothman, slammed recent spending cuts at the National Institutes of Health, the biggest funder…
