One of the nation’s largest unions is escalating its public fight with the country’s largest kosher slaughterhouse, AgriProcessors. Activists with United Food and Commercial Workers stood outside kosher supermarkets and Trader Joe’s stores around the country last Wednesday, distributing fliers that purported to be a “Kosher Food Safety Alert.” The fliers cited controversial reports —…
After a bumpy first season marked by allegations of financial mismanagement, Israel’s fledgling baseball league suffered a new setback last week with the sudden departure of its commissioner and a dozen volunteer advisers. Daniel Kurtzer, a former American ambassador to both Egypt and Israel who served as the first commissioner of the Israel Baseball League,…
A few days before Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte traveled to Islamabad last week to impress upon General Pervez Musharraf the need to restore democratic rule in Pakistan, another American envoy quietly landed in the capital to chat with the Pakistani president and army chief. With the blessing of Washington, Jack Rosen, chairman of…
Washington – The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is coming under fire from one of its major donors, Sheldon Adelson, who said the pro-Israel lobby is giving too much support to the Palestinians in advance of the upcoming peace summit. Aipac gave its blessing to a recent congressional letter supporting increased aid for the Palestinian…
The absence of Arab governments from the Camp David summit in 2000 was by most accounts a major factor in the breakdown in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and the subsequent outbreak of the second inifada. With the warring parties set to make another go of negotiations next week in Annapolis, Md., Washington appears to have learned…
More than 20 years after he fled sex abuse charges in Brooklyn, Abraham Mondrowitz is sitting in an Israeli prison. And an Israeli judge has ordered that for now, that is where he will stay. New York City police have accused Mondrowitz, a member of the Gerer Hasidic ultra-Orthodox community, of molesting hundreds of boys…
Los Angeles — As the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance tries to expand its reach, it is facing opposition on two fronts. The Los Angeles-based Holocaust remembrance museum is taking heat from its neighbors — the vast majority of them Jewish — for its plans to build a “cultural center” as an addition to…
New York’s highest court has handed an apparent victory to the younger of two warring brothers in the long-running dynastic dispute over control of the Satmar Hasidic sect. Aaron Teitelbaum, son of the late Satmar grand rebbe Moses Teitelbaum, has battled his younger — and, some say, favored — brother, Zalmen, through three levels of…
While Jews in general have been well represented among the Supreme Court’s clerks in recent decades, the same cannot be said of the Orthodox. Court watchers say you can count on one hand the number of Orthodox Jews who have served as clerks, but that figure will see a significant jump in 2008, when Harvard…
Israel’s Masorti (Conservative) Movement is threatening legal action against former Sephardi chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu for saying that “the reek of hell wafts” from Reform and Conservative synagogues, and it is therefore forbidden to walk by them. Eliyahu, a leading religious Zionist rabbi, made the remark last week during his weekly Torah lecture. It was…
An elderly friend who likes to pretend he comes from the old country but in fact comes from Detroit tells me that my two dogs make me look, well, goyish. He’s got 3,000 years of Jewish opinion to back him up. Dogs don’t do so well in the Tanakh or in the Talmud. To maintain,…
