Hoshanah Rabah, the seventh day of Sukkot (which falls this year on Monday, October 24), is regarded as the day on which the divine decree decided on Yom Kippur is sealed. For many, the day’s significance is translated into culinary terms. For example, it is customary in some quarters to eat stuffed foods such as…
Bucking American and Israeli policy, a group of former senior American and British officials steeped in Middle East affairs have been conducting a dialogue with Hamas and Hezbollah in an attempt to bring the two militant Islamic groups into the democratic fold. The former Western officials have held two meetings in Lebanon in recent months…
‘For as long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to be a Jew,” writes film director-writer-producer Norman Jewison in his just-published autobiography, “This Terrible Business Has Been Good to Me” (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press). “When I was 6, I started going to the Kenilworth synagogue, in the Beach area of Toronto, with my…
WASHINGTON — Many on Capitol Hill scoffed when Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican and an ardently pro-Israel lawmaker, started lobbying publicly in March for the chairmanship of the House International Relations Committee. Several of the other Republicans on the committee had more seniority that she did. More importantly, Ros-Lehtinen lacked the experience, connections or…
WASHINGTON — The country’s multi-billion-dollar network of Jewish charitable federations, an avid advocate for boosting government spending on social programs, has chosen a Republican activist to be its chief Washington lobbyist. This week the United Jewish Communities, the national roof body of local Jewish federations, tapped William Daroff, 36, to be its vice president for…
Among wedding faux pas, serving shrimp to your kashrut-observant in-laws ranks pretty high. But that is exactly what happened during a wedding in Washington, according to a lawsuit recently filed in U.S. District Court by Mark and Judy Siegel. The couple’s daughter, Rebecca Siegel Baron, married Craig Baron in an April 2 ceremony at the…
Even as the White House presses Saudi Arabia to permit women to drive, an ultra-Orthodox community in New York has launched a campaign to reassert its ban on female motorists. During her trip last month to Saudi Arabia, Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes delivered a speech in which she stressed the Bush administration’s determination to…
A leading Orthodox outreach group has issued an urgent fund-raising plea to support a displaced rabbi whom it claims “no longer has a synagogue or a home to return to.” Aish HaTorah, an Orthodox Jewish outreach group that is the American arm of an Israeli yeshiva, sent out a mass October 7 e-mail appeal on…
Suicide Report in Syria Syria’s official news agency has reported that the country’s interior minister, Ghazi Kenaan, committed suicide Wednesday. The announcement concerning Kenaan, who ran Lebanon as security chief until 2003, came just days before the expected release of a United Nations report on the assassination of a former Lebanese leader. “Interior Minister Brigadier…
Hebrew University of Jerusalem professor Yitzhak Robert Aumann, 75, was named co-winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Monday that Aumann, an Israeli, was awarded the prize along with the University of Maryland’s Thomas Schelling, 84, in recognition of his work on game theory, the science of…
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf called a top American Jewish communal leader this week to say that earthquake-torn Pakistan would accept emergency assistance from Israel. The call from Musharraf to Jack Rosen, chairman of the American Jewish Congress – Council for World Jewry, came Tuesday, just two days after Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom told the…
