‘In some paradoxical way, we each have come here to be alone — with our thoughts, with the last distant memory of loved ones long gone,” said David Marwell, director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, at a Holocaust Remembrance Day event held April 23 at Hunter College….
WASHINGTON — Israel and its allies in Washington could find themselves on a collision course with the Bush administration over the European Union’s plan to pay the salaries of employees in the Hamas-led Palestinian government. Faced with international pressure and with a looming humanitarian and political crisis in the Palestinian territories, sources say, the Bush…
Lev Gorn knew that Kehilat Romemu wasn’t a regular minyan when the Torah service began. Rising from their chairs and meditation cushions, the roughly 100 people in attendance last month sang a lilting melody. There was guitar and Middle Eastern tabla drumming. The Torah was passed around from one cradling embrace to the next. When…
WASHINGTON — More than two weeks have passed since Osama bin Laden called on “the entire Muslim nation” to kill Kuwaiti reformist Ahmad Al-Baghdadi and three other Arab liberals — but the news has yet to reach many corners of the Persian Gulf. “He did?” Al-Baghdadi said when informed by the Forward of bin Laden’s…
For the traditional Orthodox woman, visiting a mikveh generally serves as both a method for regulating sexual relations with a husband and a way of preparing for the possibility of pregnancy after another month in which a menstrual period came and went. But for Conservative Jew Susan Heffron, it was both an opportunity to find…
Sometimes a sesquicentennial is just a sesquicentennial. And then sometimes it’s a three-month-long series of movies, lectures and discussions, as it has been with the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco’s “FreudFest,” commemorating the 150th anniversary of the birth of the father of psychoanalysis. A few-dozen staffers and members gathered in the JCC’s three-story, sky-lit…
After several years of volunteering in a soup kitchen, rabbinical student Stephanie Kolin felt like a modern-day Sisyphus, pushing the rock of poverty endlessly uphill. “Every Monday I would go, and every Monday the same people would come back,” said Kolin, a fifth-year student at the New York campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of…
WASHINGTON — Jewish community leaders have urged the White House to refrain from publicly pledging to defend Israel against possible Iranian hostilities, senior Jewish activists told the Forward. Messages were passed to the White House through several channels, Jewish activists said. And it seems to have worked: Speaking before the annual conference of the American…
Conventional wisdom has it that the Modern Orthodox movement can be traced back to a single figure — Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, the 19th-century German theologian who argued that a balance was possible between a belief in the divine authority of scripture and citizenship in the modern world. The reality, say the organizers of a…
Sister Rose Thering, a lifelong advocate for improving interfaith relations between Catholics and Jews, died May 5 at the age of 85. Thering grew up in the largely Catholic town of Plain, Wis., and joined the religious community of the Sisters of St. Dominic at the age of 16. During her doctoral studies at Saint…
Ehud Olmert (Kadima), Prime Minister: The ex-mayor of Jerusalem who filled Ariel Sharon’s post when the former prime minister was crippled by a stroke in January, Olmert lacks Sharon’s military pedigree but is considered a shrewd politician. A scion of the long-dominant Likud party, Olmert was quick to follow Sharon when the former premier left…
