CAPE TOWN, South Africa — At a time when most Jewish leaders in South Africa are keeping a low profile on the war in Iraq, a leading Jewish jurist has called the American-led coalition attack “unlawful under international law.” In interviews published Sunday in two major newspapers, the Sunday Times and the Sunday Independent, Judge…
Last month when my mother died I followed her wishes for a funeral with a minimum of fuss and religious ritual. I arranged for a graveside service with a Reform rabbi and requested that only immediate family attend. I was aghast when an Orthodox cousin whom I had not seen in 40 years showed up…
With a gentle voice, a doughy, pleasant face and a knit yarmulke atop thinning brown hair, Mitchell Ackerson is a sort of Every Man’s Rabbi. Except for the camouflage uniform, that is. The senior chaplain for the 220th Military Police Brigade and, incidentally, the senior rabbi of the army’s entire combat theater, Ackerson sat March…
JERUSALEM — Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu maintains that Israel is teetering on the edge of an economic abyss and desperately needs an emergency rescue plan. His critics counter that his proposed cure, a stiff austerity package mixed with hefty doses of tax-cutting and privatization, is worse than the illness and will ultimately plunge the country…
December, inaugurating the world’s first entirely kosher Caribbean cruise. While in recent years, more and more cruise ships have specialized in trips offering frozen glatt kosher food or a separate kosher dining room, Shollar’s Chosen Voyage is to be the first luxury ship to be made entirely kosher, from bow to stern. For five weeks…
Of Noteworthy Items in the Press Noam Echad: As a child, he summered at Camp Massad in the Poconos, where he organized Zionist youth groups and wooed his future wife with his fluency in Hebrew. He developed an analysis of modern Hebrew grammar for his undergraduate and master’s thesis. And he and his wife seriously…
The Jewish Agency for Israel is arguing that Israel’s new austerity plan would cut immigration absorption programs so drastically as to discourage aliya and prevent needy arrivals from ever leaving absorption centers. The chief complaint of new immigrants to Israel, or olim, and their advocates is the government’s plan to cease grants awarded to every…
This week’s portion, Tazria, is concerned with purity and contamination. It contains many passages along these lines: And when a man or woman hath a plague upon the head… the priest shall look on the plague, and, behold, if the appearance thereof be deeper than the skin, and there be in it yellow thin hair,…
Under heavy criticism from Israeli politicians and American Jewish leaders, the Israeli government abandoned a proposal to end its support for a popular program offering young Diaspora Jews free trips to Israel. Reports early this week that the cash-strapped Israeli government was set to eliminate its financial support for Birthright Israel prompted an outcry among…
JERUSALEM — The Israeli military is anxiously awaiting Saddam Hussein’s last stand in Baghdad, fearing that the Iraqi president may decide to attack Israel in an ultimate act of do-or-die desperation. But while the military is wary of the war’s last days, Prime Minister Sharon appears more preoccupied with the days that will follow. Sharon…
“The Pianist,” a film about one Jew’s survival in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation, scored a major upset when it won three Oscars on March 23. The film, adapted from a memoir by Wladyslaw Szpilman, garnered Academy Awards for director Roman Polanski, lead actor Adrien Brody and screenwriter Ronald Harwood. Another Holocaust-related film, “Nowhere in…
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