The vice chair of Massachusetts’ Republican Party — and of its Republican Jewish group — says he’s pretty sure he contracted COVID-19 at the White House Hanukkah party. Tom Mountain, who has been hospitalized twice in recent weeks, told the Boston Globe on Saturday he regrets attending the Dec. 9 event, over the objections of…
Rabbi Zalman Teitelbaum, leader of a faction of the Satmar Hasidic community, has tested positive for COVID-19, according to Yeshiva World News. Teitelbaum, who is in his late 60s, is apparently showing mild symptoms, according to the site. Teitelbaum, who is based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is not the first Hasidic leader to test positive for…
For the Jewish community of Serrastretta, a small town In Italy’s southern Calabria region, it seemed like communal Hanukkah celebrations would be impossible this year — until an unexpected savior came to the rescue. Still recovering from more than 70,000 deaths as one of the world’s early coronavirus hot spots, Italy’s strict social distancing laws…
(JTA) — A court in Pakistan on Thursday ordered the immediate release of four men who had been jailed there since 2002 for the murder of the Jewish-American journalist Daniel Pearl. The Sindh High Court in Karachi ordered the release of the men, who had been acquitted of the murder, calling their detainment “illegal,” the…
(JTA) — Gal Gadot is pushing back against claims that she is whitewashing Egyptian history by portraying Cleopatra in an upcoming film. “First of all, if you want to be true to the facts, then Cleopatra was Macedonian,” the Israeli actress said in an interview Tuesday with BBC Arabic. “We were looking for a Macedonian…
President Trump has granted pardons to a group of high-profile allies including Charles Kushner, father of Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner. The elder Kushner pleaded guilty to 16 counts of tax evasion in 2004, as well as additional counts of lying to the Federal Election Commission and retaliating against a federal witness. He…
WASHINGTON (JTA) — A letter backing President-elect Joe Biden’s plan to reenter the Iran nuclear deal without any new conditions has garnered 150 signatures from House Democrats — enough to block any congressional bid to prevent the move. The sentiments in the letter are in direct contradiction to the urgings of the Israel lobby group…
(JTA) — The Department of Veterans Affairs removed two gravestones bearing swastikas from a military cemetery in Texas. With little fanfare, the VA removed the headstones on Monday morning from Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery in San Antonio. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a group that advocates for troops and veterans who report discrimination in…
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Among the last-minute rush of presidential appointments ahead of Donald Trump’s departure from office is Richard Grenell, a former ambassador to Germany and outspoken Israel advocate, to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Council. Grenell, who also has been outspoken in his efforts to isolate Iran, was among three people Trump named to…
Over the weekend, vandals claiming to belong to Antifa Bulgaria painted a synagogue in the country with graffiti reading “free Palestine” and equated the Israeli government with the Nazi regime. The target of the vandals was Bulgaria’s oldest synagogue, the Zion Synagogue in Plovdiv, a city on Bulgaria’s border with Turkey. Shalom, an organization that…
A group of Brooklyn Jews went on an extended dumpster dive Monday night in a hunt for a sacred object: a pair of tefillin that had been accidentally discarded. The leather straps and boxes that Orthodox Jewish men wear to prayer, which contain holy scriptures, were noticed missing on Thursday according to NBC New York….
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