A bitter school board election in an affluent Long Island suburb has inflamed tensions between Orthodox Jews and members of the old-guard, liberal Jewish community in Lawrence, N.Y. Tuesday’s election pitted Shlomo Huttler, a lawyer and Orthodox rabbi, against Stanley Kopilow, vice president of a local Reform temple. Kopilow won the race, which featured battling…
In the not-a-news-flash department: We live in an era in which children are accessories. They are like fabulous Birkin bags, only stickier. Now more than ever before, you can express your aesthetic, whatever it may be, through your child’s clothing and gear. Are you a nasal Juicy Couture-clad label whore? A hip-hop hoodio who covets…
His name may double as a greeting of “hello,” but a recent statue of Sholom Aleichem went missing before anyone could say goodbye. A bronze statue of the author disappeared from a central square in Kiev several weeks ago, touching off an international frenzy — fueled by speculation on the Internet — about its whereabouts….
Since the Passover Seder is a time for questions, it should come as little surprise that some would be raised by an easily missed moment tucked into the Haggada’s back half. During the recitation of the Hallel prayer that marks the second Seder’s ritual conclusion, we make a blessing and declare, “Tonight is the first…
The agonizing effort to form a post-election government in Iraq is largely over, but the struggle to bring an end to the Sunni Arab-led insurgency remains a crisis. Until that battle is won, the safety and normality so many Iraqis crave, the effective democratic government they deserve and the economic recovery they desperately need cannot…
Next month, Forward contributor Mark Oppenheimer will be release his second book, “Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Across America”(Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Below are excerpts from three of its chapters. The first is devoted to a thoughtful girl from New Haven, Conn.; the second, a bar/bat mitzvah tutor from Tampa, Fla.,…
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration “will neither recognize nor engage with” members of Hamas or Hezbollah who are elected to office unless the two militant groups disarm, a top American diplomat told the Forward. David Satterfield, the second-ranking official at the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, said that the Bush administration is not…
Rabbi Yakov Travis has a message for spiritual seekers: Come down from that mountaintop, move to Cleveland and go back to school. Travis, a professor at Cleveland’s Laura and Alvin Siegal College of Judaic Studies, has created America’s first nondenominational master’s degree program in spirituality. “This is about [the students’] own spiritual journey,” said Travis,…
JERUSALEM — In a devastating blow to the credibility of Israel’s state rabbinic establishment, the nation’s Sephardic chief rabbi, Shlomo Amar, was interrogated this week by the police on suspicion of complicity in the abduction and beating of a 17-year-old youth who was dating his daughter. Amar is not known to be suspected of direct…
Hundreds of women hoping to get in touch with their spiritual side are heading to California for a first-of-its-kind conference. Chochmat HaLev, a center for Jewish spirituality located in Berkeley, Calif., is organizing a Jewish Women’s Conference, slated for July in San Francisco. The one-day event is aimed at meeting the needs of women, who…
As part of a renewed push to reclaim art seized by the Nazis, an elderly Holocaust survivor has filed suit against the Spanish government to regain a Camille Pissarro painting taken from his grandmother. Claude Cassirer, 84, filed suit Tuesday in a Los Angeles court, demanding the return of the painting — “Rue Saint-Honoré, après-midi,…
די „שלום־עליכם לעקציע“ וועט מען קענען הערן אויפֿן אָרט אָדער דורך דער אינטערנעץ.
