The national arm of North American Jewish charitable federations is stepping up pressure on the Israeli agency responsible for immigration to take over a camp in Ethiopia, where thousands of would-be immigrants are waiting for permission to enter the Jewish state. Signaling its frustration with government inaction, United Jewish Communities is pressing the Jewish Agency…
Jewish groups are waging an 11th-hour fight to fund joint American-Israeli projects for the development of renewable energy sources. The U.S.-Israel Energy Cooperation Act provides grants of up to $20 million a year for joint research and development projects in the fields of renewable energy and alternative energy sources. The legislation was passed by the…
KIEV, Ukraine – Since assuming the title of chief rabbi of Ukraine last fall, Moshe Reuven Azman has hosted Ukraine’s president, helped negotiate American-Ukrainian trade deals and invited Israeli soldiers to his Kiev synagogue. All of this might appear to be a big step forward for the Brooklyn-based Orthodox Hasidic sect that trained Azman, Chabad…
The new center-right Swedish government has announced that it would cover the majority of the rising security costs of the country’s Jewish institutions. In a move aimed at sending a reassuring message to Sweden’s small Jewish community and a warning to Muslim radicals, the new Cabinet pledged to pay $424,000 of the community’s $707,000 security…
Kosher consumers already have to worry about whether their meat came from a cloven-hoofed animal that chews its cud, has no lung adhesions, had its blood vessels removed and received a proper salt bath within 72 hours of the slaughter. But soon there will be something else to fret about: the authenticity of the meat’s…
As American officials warn of a renewed wave of violence in Darfur, the walls of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum have been transformed, for one week, into huge projection screens carrying the images of the African genocide. The facade facing busy 15th Street, only a block away from the Washington Monument, is now bringing pictures…
A Jewish music, Hebrew and prayer teacher at a San Francisco Bay Area day school has been charged with molesting one of his students. Achi Ben Shalom, 52, was arrested on the evening of Thursday, November 16, at his home in El Cerrito, a few miles north of Berkeley. Police said that the charge of…
How did two skinny Canadian Polish Jewish kids transform the fitness world?
Any compendium of Yiddish jokes is chock-full of items about Jews on a train. They talk, they eat, they sleep — all in the buildup toward some punch line about how Jews traveled in the old country. It was the “Jews on a train” phenomenon that Romanian-born Rabbi Moshe Shapiro was hoping to address when…
Young thespians take center stage in “Kids & Yiddish: Bagels & Yuks!” a bilingual musical comedy for families. The show is the eighth edition of the holiday production presented by the newly renamed National Yiddish Theatre — Folksbiene, along with the theater troupe Kids & Yiddish. A multimedia satire that blends Jewish folk traditions, pop…
In Sophocles’s play “Ajax,” the eponymous hero exclaims to his son, “Lad, may you be more fortunate than your father, but like him in everything else!” This could well have been Isaac’s blessing for both Esau the hunter and Jacob the fire-keeper. This week’s portion, Toledot, is ostensibly the story of Isaac, but it concentrates…
