NEW YORK (JTA) — On March 16, the man I was dating asked me to become his wife. At the time, social distancing was a relatively new phenomenon and Lysol wipes were still available for purchase at my local drugstore. However, the fear and uncertainty had begun to spread, and only about 15 people attended…
Firefighters saved a 100-year-old Torah from a house fire on Arcadia Court in Boca Raton, Fla. on Tuesday. The firefighters extinguished the blaze and went back into the home to get the Torah at the owners’ request. In a video posted by the local CBS News affiliate, a woman, presumably a resident of the home,…
(JTA) — Last week, thousands of Jews in Israel and beyond responded to a plea for help in identifying a couple pictured in a yellowing photograph from 1955. “Everyone, I need help. I found this picture on a Tel Aviv street,” Ariel Plavnik, a 43-year-old tourism salesperson from Kfar Saba, Israel, wrote in Hebrew and…
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Most House Democrats have made it clear: Israel should desist from annexing parts of the West Bank. As of Thursday, a letter to Israeli leaders warning of annexation’s perils had garnered 191 of the 233 members of the Democratic caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives. Among Jewish Democrats, 23 of 25…
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Jamaal Bowman, the middle school principal who challenged longtime Rep. Eliot Engel in New York’s 16th District, has declared victory based on his 2-1 lead among voters who headed to the polls for this week’s primary. Mail-in votes are still being counted, so Engel, the Jewish chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee,…
(JTA) — A federal grand jury has indicted a Massachusetts man accused of using a homemade explosive to commit arson at a Jewish-sponsored assisted living facility. John Michael Rathbun, 36, was charged on two counts Tuesday, according to a statement issued by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts. He faces up to 10 years in…
(JTA) — The Georgia legislature approved a hate crimes bill that allows a longer sentence for crimes deemed to be based on a particular bias. The effort was led in part by the Hate Free Georgia Coalition, a group of 35 nonprofit groups organized by the Anti-Defamation League, the Atlanta Jewish Times reported. Jewish groups…
AMSTERDAM (JTA) — A statue that is seen as commemorating the suffering of slaves was vandalized inside a Jewish cemetery near the Dutch capital. Orange paint was splashed on the statue titled “Elieser” on Wednesday at the Beth Haim Portuguese cemetery in Ouderkerk aan de Amstel, the oldest Jewish burial site in the Netherlands. The…
(JTA) — A prominent British lawmaker for the Labour Party praised and retweeted an article that claimed falsely that Israeli secret services trained U.S. police in knee chokes. Rebecca Long-Bailey, who ran for the party’s leadership in April and now is its point person for education issues, wrote Thursday on Twitter, “Maxine Peake is an…
Researchers in the United Kingdom are investigating a possible “Jewish factor” that could explain why Jews there were disproportionately likely to die of coronavirus, the Jewish Chronicle reported. A study by Britain’s Office of National Statistics found that Jewish males were more than twice as likely to die from COVID-19 than Christian males. The heightened…
(JTA) – Even before the coronavirus pandemic hit the New York region in March, the Orthodox community was on edge. A surge in anti-Semitic incidents targeting visibly Orthodox Jews climaxed with an attack in which a man was killed by a machete at a Hanukkah party in December. Then the virus hit, forcing the closure…
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