WASHINGTON (JTA) — When Harry Reid was 19, he wanted to marry Landra Gould. Her Jewish parents had other ideas. Reid, a middleweight boxer, got into a fistfight with Gould’s father in the Goulds’ front yard. And then he and Landra eloped. Reid’s pugilistic sensibility served him well, lifting him up from abject poverty through…
(JTA) — The former host of “Big Brother Brasil” has been hit with a wave of antisemitism after getting into an online argument about the reality show with a popular soap opera actor. After the actor Icaro Silva criticized the show, calling it “mediocre entertainment,” Tiago Leifert, who is Jewish and hosted the show from…
(JTA) — The clock has run out on 2021, and in the world of Jewish sports, it’s been an exciting year. From a very Jewish World Series to inspiring performances in the Olympics and Paralympics, Jewish athletes and teams accomplished impressive feats across sports and around the world. For the Jewish Sport Report, we scoured…
LONDON (JTA) — There are two sketches of Philipp Manes, a leading early-20th-century German-Jewish businessman, in the notebooks that he kept with him during his two-year imprisonment at the Theresienstadt transit camp. Both are drawn shortly before Manes was deported to Auschwitz in October 1944, and could not be more different. One portrait shows Manes…
(JTA) — In 2016, Jack Feldman’s 10-year-old great-grandson asked him about the number tattooed on his skin. Their conversation became the basis of the short HBO documentary “The Number on Great-Grandpa’s Arm,” an introduction to the Holocaust intended for children. Veteran documentary filmmaker Amy Schatz was attracted to the project because, she said at the…
(JTA) — (New York Jewish Week via JTA) — The New York City-based Jewish Queer Youth organization received a $1 million donation to expand its social services to Orthodox LGBTQ youth nationwide. The gift comes from Toronto-based real estate developer Paul Austin, CEO of the Salpam Group, and his partner, Dalip Girdhar, who works in…
(JTA) — The remains of an ancient synagogue dating back as far as the 7th century A.D. have been discovered in a resort town on Turkey’s mediterranean coast. The synagogue was found recently in the town of Side, not far from the tourist hotspot of Antalya, in southern Turkey. Among the remains was a plaque…
(JTA) — Chaim Walder, an Israeli haredi Orthodox children’s book author who was accused last month of sexual abuse by several teenage girls, was found dead Monday in an apparent suicide, according to Israeli news reports. Walder was 53 years old. After a successful career as a columnist, radio host, teacher, public speaker and most…
(JTA) — Desmond Tutu, the archbishop who identified closely with the historical suffering of the Jewish people in his forceful advocacy against apartheid in South Africa, died Sunday at age 90. Tutu, the first Black archbishop of Cape Town, used his role as a church leader to bring religion into the fight against apartheid, South…
(JTA) — About 150,000 Jewish victims of Nazi persecution are set to receive emergency funding of approximately $1,400 per person from Germany in the coming days, according to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. The funds, totaling about $200 million and referred to as the Supplemental Hardship Fund Payment, were negotiated in 2020…
(JTA) — A joint religious declaration in Hungary promoting the “sanctification” of heterosexual marriage was signed by the country’s two largest Jewish groups. Three days later, one of the groups apologized for the statement. The Dec. 9 document, “Joint Declaration of the Churches on the Holiness of Marriage,” promoted exclusion of gay people and unmarried…
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