John McCandlish Phillips Jr., a longtime New York Times reporter who wrote about a Jewish man who became a senior Ku Klux Klan official, has died. Phillips, who as a journalist was admired for his style and integrity, died Tuesday in Manhattan from complications of pneumonia. He was 85. Phillips’ profile of Daniel Burros documented…
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is to consider liberalising access to Judaism’s Western Wall, officials said on Wednesday, citing concern that police-enforced Orthodox controls on women worshippers alienate Jews abroad. A compromise proposed by a Netanyahu envoy would expand the Jerusalem prayer site’s plaza, where worshippers are segregated by sex in accordance with Orthodox ritual…
Gilles Bernheim, the chief rabbi of France, refused to quit on Tuesday despite admitting to several counts of plagiarism and deception about his academic credentials. The revelations have shocked France’s 600,000-strong Jewish community and Bernheim has come under pressure to quit, but he said resigning would be a “desertion” as he came clean on one…
Cosmetics heir and art collector Leonard A. Lauder donated his collection of 78 Cubist works valued at more than a $1 billion to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Arts, its director said on Tuesday. The collection, which consists of 33 works by Picasso, 17 by Braque, 14 by Gris and 14 by Leger, was amassed…
A Marc Chagall painting stolen more than 10 years ago was discovered in the home of former Italian soccer star Roberto Bottega. Italy’s art-theft police said Monday that “Le Nu au Bouquet,” painted in 1920 by the renowned Jewish artist and reportedly worth $1.3 million, was found in the Turin home of Bottega, formerly of…
Eleven mezuzahs and doorframes were set on fire in Brooklyn on Monday, in what New York police is treating as a hate crime. The vandalism took place at the Taylor White Public Houses, in the predominantly haredi section of South Williamsburg. Mezuzahs were scorched from the third floor all the way up to the 12th,…
The proposal to create an expanded section for egalitarian prayer at the Western Wall in Jerusalem has picked up a crucial supporter: Anat Hoffman, director of the Israel Religious Action Center and chair of Women of the Wall, the group of women that has for decades sought to pray and read Torah at Judaism’s holiest…
A slide on extremist threats lumping haredi Orthodox Jews, among others, with groups like the Ku Klux Klan and al-Qaida was used once and removed, the U.S. Army said. The slide, revealed Tuesday in a report by the London Daily Mail, lists under the rubric of “Religious Extremism” terms such as “evangelical Christianity (U.S./Christian),” “Ultra-Orthodox…
The driver that killed esteemed Princeton rabbi Jim Diamond, had been taking depression medication and the police were called to his home a week before the accident, according to local reports. The Princeton Packet said that Eric Maltz, 20, had trashed his bedroom on March 21, but the police found him “calmly sitting on his…
Mike Engelman, who is suspected of selling non-kosher food from his Doheny Glatt Kosher Meat Market in Los Angeles, is being sued. City News Service, a Los Angeles media outlet, reported Tuesday that at least two lawsuits have been filed in Los Angeles Superior Court for fraud, breach of contract, battery, and intentional and negligent…
On his nationally syndicated radio show on Monday, conservative host Michael Savage slammed metzitzah b’peh, the Orthodox Jewish circumcision ritual that has led to the transmission of herpes in infant males. Savage, citing a Fox News online article headlined, “Two infants contract herpes following circumcision,” said it was a story “that shakes you to your…
