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I lost my non-Jewish aunt. Could I sit shiva for her?
At the start of this year, I received news that my aunt, who lived in Scotland, where my mother and her seven siblings were born and raised, had lost her nearly five-year-long battle with pancreatic cancer. That following Friday night proved more difficult than I could have anticipated. I’m in my senior year of college,…
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‘Yes, you can bench-press me’: Remembering a 50-pound Jewish disabilities advocate who matched fierce with funny
Sheryl Grossman once told me that her goal was to become the oldest person with Bloom’s Syndrome, a genetic disorder so rare that doctors have recorded fewer than 400 cases since it was named in 1954. One in four of those afflicted with the disease, like my friend Sheryl, are Ashkenazi Jews; most died before…
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‘Jewish blood helps’: In Ukraine, what once held people back now speeds them to safety
BUCHAREST — Victoria Astakhova, a 66-year-old construction engineer from Kyiv, grew up in the Soviet era, when the stamp on her identity card subjected her to antisemitism from neighbors and limits on how high she could advance at work. “In college,” she recalled, “when my dorm mate discovered my card was stamped ‘Jew,’ she didn’t…
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Yeshiva enrollment points to huge Hasidic growth outside New York City
Yeshiva enrollment in Rockland County grew more than 63% in the past decade, underscoring rapid Hasidic population growth in counties north of New York City where these families have increasingly settled in recent years. The data, gathered by the Orthodox Jewish Public Affairs Council, also showed enrollment at Brooklyn schools ticking up a more modest…
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The greatest show in Division III? It’s a student-run sports broadcast
After a whirlwind season that could be described as the greatest in school history, this Yeshiva University team will soon bid farewell to its do-it-all leader, a savant who took the program to new heights. But this upstart bunch of bochurs doesn’t wear jerseys — unless you count their custom white polos — and its…
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Holocaust survivors filled out nearly 200,000 claims with Project HEART. Then they heard nothing.
In 2011 Israel launched Project HEART, an ambitious program to compensate survivors and their heirs for property lost during the Holocaust. Israel invested nearly $8 million in the project, and over the next three years it collected nearly 200,000 claims for about two million pieces of property, according to former project director Bobby Brown. And…
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YU’s Turell dishes on Macs career, Sarachek, and preparing for the NBA draft
'It feels like just yesterday when I was playing in the tournament myself'
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Matan Kahana, a Bennett ally, visits U.S. to promote religious reforms in Israel
In a country like Israel, where regional conflicts and diplomacy are always dominating the headlines, a ministry with seemingly less relevance has caught the attention of Israeli citizens and American Jewry alike. The ministry for religious services, headed by Matan Kahana, a member of Prime Minister Naftali Bennet’s Yamina Party, has in recent months undergone…
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As movements recede in Jewish life, Reform and Conservative seminaries shrink
Enrollment at non-Orthodox rabbinical seminaries has been on a downward trajectory for years, but the data shows an especially alarming pattern for schools affiliated with major Jewish movements. While the overall number of students studying to become non-Orthodox rabbis in the United States has only gradually declined over the past decade, a Forward analysis found…
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Meet the Israeli-born developer who wants to create an urban kibbutz for homeless people
When Izek Shomof looks at the massive, abandoned Sears building he owns in a crowded urban neighborhood east of downtown Los Angeles, he sees a kibbutz.A kibbutz for homeless people. When the Israeli-born Shomof, 62, purchased the Boyle Heights property in 2013, he planned to develop it into a high-end, live-work complex taking advantage of…
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‘At 15, you can grow up’: Refugee stories of anguish and hope at the Ukrainian border
MEDYKA, Poland — It was weeks after the bombs started falling close to her fifth-floor apartment in Kyiv that Irena Sakada began to really worry about her 15-year-old daughter, Sofia. That’s when Sofia put down her paints. Unlike most of their friends, Sakada, a manicurist who is 46, had expected the Russian attack, and had…
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