The largest wildfire in California’s history has led to the evacuation of a Jewish summer camp and destroyed at least one of its buildings, but a staffer managed to save a Holocaust-era Torah scroll. The Yosemite Rim Fire triggered the cancellation of Camp Tawonga’s annual Keshet LGBTQ Family Camp, San Francisco’s j. weekly reported. On…
Muriel Siebert, the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, has died of complications from cancer, Leonard Leiman, a director at her firm Siebert Financial Corp., said on Sunday. She was 80. The founder and president of Muriel Siebert & Co. Inc, Siebert purchased her seat on the exchange in…
Two students committed a series of racial and anti-Semitic incidents at Oberlin College to provoke a reaction, according to police in the Ohio city. According to a police report released late last week, one of the students said he meant the acts as a “joke,” as well as to show how students and college staff…
Incidents of physical and sexual abuse at Yeshiva University were not limited to its high school for boys, an investigation has found. An outside investigation commissioned by the university following reports of sexual abuse by two faculty members at Y.U.’s high school for boys in the 1970s and ‘80s confirmed that “multiple incidents of varying…
The site is situated on a hilltop overlooking the Elah Valley in the Judean hills, where according to the Bible, David and Goliath held their legendary battle. The excavators, Yossi Garfinkel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Saar Ganor of the Israel Antiquities Authority, have identified Khirbet Qeiyafa as the biblical town of Shaarayim,…
An Israeli architectural firm defended its involvement in the planned construction of a shopping mall on a former concentration camp for Jews in Serbia. “We cannot be suspected in being insensitive to anything relating to the Holocaust,” Ami Moore of the MYS firm in Tel Aviv said in a statement sent to JTA. Moore was…
Amid fresh warnings of anti-Semitism in Hungary, some 100,000 Jews from across Europe are expected to attend Budapest’s largest-ever Jewish Summer Festival. The week-long cultural festival, which opened Saturday, is being hosted for the 16th year running by the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities, or MAZSIHISZ, and co-organized by the Israeli Jewish Congress. “Part of…
The Interior Ministry is challenging asylum claims by Eritreans who, it says, are Ethiopian and thus eligible for deportation. A Central District Court judge has ruled in favor of the state in 18 out of 19 petitions against the ministry’s classification. Eritrean citizens in Israel are granted collective ‘temporary protection’ and are not deported to…
Religious Services Minister Naftali Bennett hailed Sunday’s completion of a large platform for non-Orthodox prayer at the southernmost portion of the Western Wall as a history-making event. But the Women of the Wall, who have led the fight for non-Orthodox prayer at the Kotel, derided the new platform as “a sunbathing deck that overlooks the…
Jerusalem’s Western Wall on Sunday was cleared of notes sent to God by worshippers, making room for new pleads-on-paper to be put into the cracks of the ancient stones. Millions of people a year visit the Western Wall and leave written prayers on pieces of paper which they wedge into the cracks of the wall….
A Torah scroll that since 1942 has been hidden in a Tuchow monastery was returned to the synagogue in Dabrowa Tarnowska in southern Poland. The Torah was returned earlier this month but reported for the first time on Saturday. It had been brought to the monastery in Tuchow, approximately 60 miles from Krakow, by an…
