(J. The Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — Approximately two months after the Chabad House in Almaden Valley, a San Jose suburb, was destroyed by a fire, the synagogue community is receiving support from an unlikely source: the Azerbaijani government. “I am glad that our consulate was able to contribute funds to the reconstruction,” Consul…
(JTA) – A brand-new, $50 million campus. A month in Israel every year. And a program to help students turn their social-service ideas into fully fledged nonprofits. These are just some of the perks offered by the Jewish Leadership Academy, a new Jewish day school in Miami that aims to merge traditional Jewish learning with…
This article originally appeared on Haaretz, and was reprinted here with permission. March 1 will mark a year since the landmark High Court of Justice ruling that recognized non-Orthodox conversions performed in Israel for the purpose of the Law of Return. In theory, the decision meant that any individual converted in Israel by either the…
(JTA) — Roblox, a collaborative computer gaming platform for children as young as 7, has faced serious criticism over the years for failing to properly moderate its content — with antisemitism and racism rife, according to multiple reports. Now the platform says it has removed a virtual Nazi concentration camp featuring gas chambers that users…
(JTA) — Residents of Colleyville, Texas, the community where a rabbi and three of his congregants were held hostage for 12 hours at the local synagogue last month, woke up over the weekend to find antisemitic flyers on their driveways and yards. The flyers, which were strewn about the town in plastic zip-top bags with…
(JTA) — The sister and brother-in-law of Bernie Madoff, the hedge fund manager who ran a $50 billion Ponzi scheme that counted a number of major Jewish nonprofits among its victims, died in an apparent murder-suicide. Sondra Wiener, 87, and Marvin Wiener, 90, were found dead at their home in Boynton Beach, Florida Thursday. The…
(JTA) — Most film debuts don’t include licking a taser while dressed as a mime, or having a scorpion crawl on one’s face. But when it comes to the “Jackass” TV and movie franchise, that’s par for the course. That doesn’t mean Rachel Wolfson’s Jewish parents weren’t a little worried about her joining the stunt…
(JTA) — David Brog, who leads the Maccabee Task Force, a group that cultivates pro-Israel students on campus, and a longtime protege of the Adelsons, the Las Vegas-based Republican Jewish kingmaker couple, is running for Congress in Nevada. The late Sheldon Adelson and his widow Miriam launched the Maccabee Task Force in 2015. Before entering…
(JTA) — The Montreal Holocaust Museum, which first opened its doors in 1979, will move into a new $80 million site in the city’s historic Jewish quarter in Plateau Mont-Royal by 2025. Lined with hip eateries and indie bookstores and bordered by the city’s Gay Village to the south and Little Italy to the north,…
(JTA) — (New York Jewish Week via JTA) — The Crown Heights riots, which roiled the Brooklyn neighborhood over four days in 1991, were some of the most thoroughly documented events in New York City history: Covered in real time by local, national and global media, the violence was recounted by witnesses in numerous civil…
(JTA) — (New York Jewish Week via JTA) — Photographer Emile Bocian grew up the son of Polish Jewish immigrants in New York. But when he died in 1990 at 78, he left an unlikely legacy as a chronicler of Manhattan’s bustling Chinatown. A photographer by hobby, if not vocation, Bocian took some 80,000 to…
