With March Madness cancelled by coronavirus, Jewish basketball aficionados lost the chance to cheer underdog qualifier Yeshiva University through the championships. But you can still engage in Jewish bracket betting. On Thursday, homebound members of the University of Missouri Hillel took to Twitter to create a virtual tournament of famous Jews from all time periods…
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is working out at the high court’s private gym, with precautions, during the pandemic, her trainer said. “Everybody’s been shut down,” Bryant Johnson told Law 360, a legal news website, this week. “The only reason why I didn’t shut the justice down is because, hey, she…
MONTREAL (JTA) — Jewish Canadians streaming from Florida to outrun the coronavirus and beat the pre-Passover rush unwittingly helped stoke one of the highest virus-positive rates in Quebec province. Cote St. Luc, a Montreal suburb with the densest and most elderly Jewish population in Quebec, reported some of earliest cases and has declared a state…
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Rabbi Barry Freundel, a once-prominent Modern Orthodox rabbi in Washington, D.C., who was convicted for secretly videotaping women in his synagogue’s mikvah, is set to be released on Wednesday. Amy Zubrensky, an assistant U.S. attorney, alerted Freundel’s victims on Wednesday with an email. Because of “swiftly moving events,” she wrote, “I just…
(JTA) — A Jewish day school in Los Angeles donated 2,000 N95 face masks to a local medical center and to local police. The de Toledo High School in the West Hills neighborhood said in a statement that while doing a thorough cleaning of the campus, it found boxes of the masks purchased for the…
(JTA) — Federal charges have been levied against a Pennsylvania man for posting online threats against Jews and other minorities. Corbin Kauffman, 31, posted a threatening image on a social media website on March 13, 2019, that featured a digitally created image of his arm and hand aiming an AR-15 rifle at praying Jewish men…
For kosher food pantries, Passover is already the busiest time of year, a time when many Jewish New Yorkers need help procuring the pricey food that meets the holiday’s dietary restrictions. But this Passover is unlike any other. As coronavirus takes its toll on family finances, food pantries stretching supplies of kosher-for-Passover food to serve…
(JTA) — On a typical day, the art center at Kohelet Yeshiva High School in suburban Philadelphia is filled with students working on a range of projects — from making ceramic bowls on the pottery wheels to creating wooden sculptures. They use the 3-D printer and laser cutter to build parts for the robotics team….
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Videoconferencing a seder — that’s a no-no. So say Israel’s chief rabbis, who issued a list of Jewish religious legal rulings for “Passover in the shadow of corona.” A group of Israeli Sephardic Orthodox rabbis last week issued a letter approving the use of a videoconferencing program such as Zoom to bring families…
(JTA) — Maurice Bidermann, a French textile magnate and Holocaust survivor, died in Paris at the age of 87. Meyer Habib, a French-Jewish lawmaker, wrote on Twitter that his late friend Bidermann had died Monday of the coronavirus — a claim that was denied, according to the PurePeople fashion news site, by Bidermann’s relatives, who…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — The Western Wall stones were cleaned and sanitized ahead of Passover. Every year, the prayer notes tucked between the stones in the wall are removed at Passover and before the High Holidays, and buried with other sacred papers according to Jewish law in the cemetery on the Mount of Olives. This year,…
