Toronto – In a case that has rocked one of North America’s largest Conservative synagogues, a woman who was taking singing lessons from an area rabbi is claiming that the rabbi seduced her. She is seeking a total of more than $1 million in damages from both him and the synagogue he once served. Yona…
Oakland, Calif. – Rabbi Chai Levy is considering a High Holy Days sermon on perseverance in the face of great adversity — and given her synagogue’s recent history, she certainly has enough anecdotal material. While Congregation Kol Shofar hasn’t quite achieved Job-like levels of trouble, the past few years have proved staggeringly unlucky for the…
If there’s one strain that runs consistently throughout Jewish history, it’s that of loss: loss of people, places, institutions, languages, sensibilities and identities. Given this litany of woe, I have often thought that the notion of “once upon a time” seemed more apt for the Jews than for the characters of fairytales. Occasionally, though, something…
23 Elul 5761 (September 11, 2001) accompanying the rumble of burning jet fuel and fatiguing metal echoes in skyscraper ravines first responders sirens wailing from all directions apocalyptic cacophony earlier that morning shofrot blaring from the four corners of the City annual heralds of the coming Judgment Day (It is customary to blow the shofar…
Jeremiah Lockwood stepped onto the small stage at a dimly lit bar in Brooklyn a few weeks ago and immediately summoned the audience’s attention with his unabashed gusto and fervor. He seemed a man with a mission. His band, The Sway Machinery, performed his arrangements of traditional cantorial music, and Lockwood belted out Hebrew lyrics…
Two-day Yom Tovs are decadent enough, but double-day holidays that run into the Sabbath are nothing short of gluttonous. This fall, observant Jews are facing a series of three-day festivals that will surely result in marathon large meals, loosened pants and discarded belts. But one group of New Yorkers living on Manhattan’s Upper West Side…
Campaign Confidential is easing back into desk life after 13 days in the wilds of Maine and looking ahead to High Holidays. To wit: Jewish supporters of Obama are pushing the “Obama-kah” to those who may want to wear their politics on their heads while listening to the sound of shofar.
Was it selective amnesia on the part of the New York Post’s gossip maven Cindy Adams? Her August 21 column, “Unknown Stories of the Queen of Mean,” savaged her onetime friend Leona Helmsley (nee Rosenthal), who died the day before at age 87. The unforgivable sin of all sins that enraged Adams was Helmsley’s ousting…
In one of the stranger commemorations planned for Israel’s upcoming 60th birthday, a man’s body will be disinterred in Washington, D.C., and moved halfway around the world to Jerusalem. The body being moved is that of Stephen Norman, the only grandson of the modern Zionist movement’s founder, Theodor Herzl, and the only descendant of Herzl…
Turkish, Israeli and American Jewish officials held frantic consultations in the past week in an effort to defuse a diplomatic crisis prompted by the Anti-Defamation League’s recent description of the Ottoman massacre of Armenians during World War I as “tantamount to genocide.” Senior Israeli and American Jewish officials went out of their way to restate…
Jerusalem – As occurs every seven years, religious Jews in Israel are grappling with the biblical commandment to let their land lie fallow. But this year there are some added complications. The sabbatical year, which begins next month, has traditionally been handled by buying produce from non-Jews. In past years, much of the substitute produce…
