(JTA) — Rabbi Shlomo Adelman returned to his position leading a Modern Orthodox yeshiva in New Jersey in October, just weeks being placed on leave following an allegation that he had molested a camper decades earlier. So it came as a surprise on Wednesday morning when parents at Torah Academy of Bergen County woke up…
(JTA) — PUNTA DEL ESTE, Uruguay (JTA) — A Jewish businessman has offered to buy an 800-pound eagle and swastika crest from a former Nazi ship that is sitting in a Uruguay warehouse and explode it into “a thousand pieces.” A private expedition recovered the 6-foot-tall Nazi swastika and eagle crest in 2006. It had…
(JTA) — Last Passover, a group of 125 Jews gathered via Zoom for a community mikvah ritual. Dr. Harriette Wimms, a queer Black Jewish psychologist and kohenet (Hebrew priestess), opened the ceremony by pouring libations, an African tradition of granting a water offering for ancestors. Some people immersed themselves in their bathtubs, spilled water down…
(JTA) — Members of one of Israel’s Arab political parties are vowing to boycott Knesset proceeding, and thus threatening the coalition that governs by a slim majority, over what they see as an attack on their constituents among the Bedouin Arabs of Israel’s Negev region. That offensive has come in the form of forestation efforts…
(JTA) — That Ivy League schools placed quotas on the number of Jews admitted to their classes through much of the first half of the twentieth century has long been established as fact. But the existence of a quota on Jewish students at Stanford University in Northern California was never more than a rumor —…
(JTA) — A funeral procession outside a local church in Rome featured a casket wrapped in a Nazi swastika flag, sparking outrage in the Italian capital. The Roman Catholic Church strongly condemned the incident on Tuesday. In a statement, the Vicariate of Rome described the incident as “serious, offensive, and unacceptable.” The Italian news site…
Avodah, a New York-based Jewish social justice organization, was hearing the same thing from Jewish group after Jewish group: They wanted to start social action projects, or see more concrete progress on ones already in place — but didn’t know how. In response, Avodah launched the Avodah Institute for Social Change, a program that will…
(JTA) — (New York Jewish Week via JTA) — In a boon for scholars and amateur researchers, records from Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust authority, are now publicly available through JewishGen, the largest online Jewish genealogy resource of its kind. The agreement announced Tuesday by Yad Vashem and New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage/A Living Memorial to…
ANN ARBOR, Michigan (JTA) — The University of Michigan’s Frankel Center for Judaic Studies announced that it had received a new gift in excess of $1 million from local benefactors. The money will primarily be used to create a new full-time endowed professorship on the faculty. The gift comes from the estate of Stuart and…
(JTA) — This article originally appeared on Alma. There’s a new siddur on the block that uses all nonbinary Hebrew forms and neopronouns for G-d* in English. “Siddur Davar Ḥadash” is designed for accessibility, with full transliteration and full translation, via searchable PDF — or open-source text, which allows users to customize it. The siddur was…
Update: New York City Council Member Vicki Paladino apologized Tuesday saying that she regretted the comparison as soon as she said it and had and asked the television reporter interviewing her “to strike it from the record.” The apology came a day after the interview aired. She said: “It is never okay to compare anything…
