In April 1941, a Romanian census taker came to the home of a suspected Roma Gypsy working as a blacksmith in the picturesque town of Schaas. The senior Nazi statistical official observing the process wrote, “He did not dare to deny his ethnical descent as Gypsy.” The census taker instructed: “Now, please write: Gypsy.” Shortly…
When Hillel’s newly minted executive, Kinney Zalesne, was in college, the Hillel on her campus at Yale held little appeal for her. For four years, she maintained a skeptical distance from the whole institution. “To me, Hillel was for people who were only socially comfortable with other Jews and whose cultural interests were mainly Jewish,”…
Austrian President Dies Austrian President Thomas Klestil, the first head of the Alpine state to visit Israel, died Tuesday, two days before his scheduled retirement. Klestil became president in 1992 and restored the reputation of the Austrian presidency after his predecessor, Kurt Waldheim, was revealed to have had links to the Nazis. He also opposed…
YONKERS, N.Y. — Last summer, when Allan Turkheim and his wife drove up to the graves of his wife’s family at the cemetery of the Congregation People of Righteousness in this city just north of the Bronx, he almost didn’t believe his eyes. Where the remains of his relatives once lay he saw only the…
The New York State Legislature has passed legislation to protect kosher consumers from food products falsely advertised as kosher. The new law is intended to replace New York’s previous kosher law, which was struck down in the courts last year after being declared unconstitutional. New York is home to the country’s largest Jewish population, as…
An article on the front-page of the June 3 New York Times was scary. It notes that the Bush campaign is reaching out to thousands of churches around the country to involve them in distributing campaign fliers and registering voters on behalf of the president’s November run. The move makes history. It seems that at…
PARIS — President Bush’s latest tour of Europe, aimed at fence mending, instead has touched off another round of Franco-American feuding, with Bush and French President Jacques Chirac trading barbs over everything from NATO’s role in Iraq to Yasser Arafat’s role in Ramallah. For many observers here, however, the most telling exchange was over the…
American Orthodox leaders say they are struggling to stay out of the debates tearing at Israel’s religious community over Prime Minister Sharon’s Gaza disengagement plan. Modern Orthodox groups in America traditionally look to Israel’s so-called national religious camp, embodied in the National Religious Party and the chief rabbinate, as primary counterparts in Israel. Like Israeli…
JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Sharon faces a new and growing threat to his plan for evacuating settlements in Gaza and the West Bank: Right-wing rabbis who have ruled that dismantling settlements violates Jewish religious law. Some rabbis are calling on soldiers to disobey orders and on settlers to resist evacuation forcibly. With major rabbinic figures…
TEL AVIV — Prime Minister Sharon was clear and adamant. “We will make sure,” he told his audience, “that this will not happen again — not before the withdrawal from Gaza and not after.” “This” was a Qassam rocket attack Monday on the Negev town of Sderot, two miles from the Gaza border. A day…
WASHINGTON — In another diplomatic victory for Israel’s government, the Bush administration is turning a cold shoulder to a Palestinian initiative that would schedule general elections in the West Bank and Gaza as soon as January 2005. The Palestinians are touting the idea as a tool to produce a new, reformed leadership, but the administration…
