WARSAW, Poland (JTA) — At 100 years old, Jozef Walaszczyk is Poland’s oldest living rescuer of Jews. He was fortunate enough just to survive World War II. As a partisan fighter who specialized in smuggling arms in Nazi-occupied Poland, Walaszczyk assumed that the Gestapo would catch up with him at some point. He just expected it…
(JTA) — Mike Finesilver started attending daily services for the first time since his bar mitzvah shortly after joining Congregation Beth El in 2012. Praying every day with the same small group of people was “a wonderful experience” for the 62-year-old paralegal, and he enjoyed being deeply involved with the Conservative synagogue in South Orange,…
(JTA) — Famed Jewish writer Shel Silverstein is best known for iconic children’s books such as “The Giving Tree” and poetry collections like “Where the Sidewalk Ends.” Less-known about the famous children’s author? He lived on a houseboat named “Evil Eye” in Sausalito, California, from around 1967 to 1975. And you can now buy that…
(JTA) — Rabbi Zalman Kossovsky, a former chief rabbi of Zurich who led congregations on three continents during a career that spanned decades, has died. Despite German language media reports, Kossovsky’s synagogue in Boynton Beach, Florida, stressed that he passed away Sunday of natural causes unconnected to the coronavirus pandemic. He was 80. Born in…
AMSTERDAM (JTA) — On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, a Dutch-Muslim politician has tweeted a picture of a Jewish yellow star to protest plans to monitor coronavirus carriers. Arnoud van Doorn, a member of the City Council of The Hague, posted the picture on Monday, the birthday of Adolf Hitler. Yom Hashoah, Israel’s day…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Blue and White chairman Benny Gantz signed a deal Monday to form a “national emergency government’ that keeps Netanyahu as the prime minister for now. Israel has spent more than a year under a caretaker government as neither Netanyahu nor Gantz could assemble a coalition government. With…
(JTA) — Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and Holocaust imagery continue to be mainstays at anti-lockdown protests against governors and in state capitols. A placard at an anti-lockdown protest held Saturday in Columbus, Ohio, in front of the state capitol bore the image of the body of a rat standing on its hind legs with a Star…
(JTA) — Police have released images from a surveillance video showing a young white man man spray-painting swastikas on a synagogue in Sarasota, Florida. The vandalism to the front doors of Temple Emanu-El in Sarasota caused about $5,000 in damages, according to the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office. The incident occurred on April 2 after midnight….
(JTA) — The scene at the Parker Jewish Institute, a Jewish nursing home in Long Island, New York, is scary: nurses are wearing trash bags as protective gowns and reusing masks due to equipment shortages, and deaths have risen rapidly and may be underreported. The facility is part of a report on the “coronavirus horror…
Orthodox yeshivas for boys in Williamsburg are running underground schools in closed synagogues and apartment buildings despite social distancing requirements imposed by the city and state to try to slow the spread of coronavirus, a parent whose child attended one of the secret schools told the Forward. UPDATE: NYC breaks up one secret yeshiva operating…
(JTA) — The windows of a New Haven, Connecticut synagogue were shot full of holes by a BB gun, local police said. New Haven Police said in a statement issued on Saturday that it was continuing to investigate the vandalism at the synagogue in the Westville neighborhood. The damage to three windows near the front…
