Just before authorities released the names of the victims of the Boulder, Colorado shooting, Liz Hanson woke up and got dressed, slipping into a pair of tie-dyed pants she bought at the store of her friend Lonna Bartkowiak. Moments later she learned that Bartkowiak, 49, had been shot and killed. “I found out she was…
(JTA) — British Jewish artist Leon Fenster loved his adopted city so much that he designed a Passover Haggadah with it as the theme. So when he left the Chinese capital for Taiwan in early 2020 at the outset of the pandemic, he made a vow: Next year in Beijing, again. A year later, Fenster…
(JTA) — The first Jewish mayor of a district in the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo died after two weeks battling COVID-19. Andres Abt died on March 12 at the age of 47. Two days later, his funeral procession to the Jewish cemetery in Montevideo stopped by the Torre Ejecutiva, the headquarters of the federal government,…
The television exit polls show that the main event of the past year – the coronavirus – didn’t influence Israeli voters at all. What hasn’t happened to us since the last election? Lockdowns, quarantines, more than 6,000 deaths, face masks, cellphone tracking by the Shin Bet security service, huge deficits, soaring unemployment, Saturday night demonstrations…
Emily Sigalow, an executive at UJA-Federation of New York, was shocked at the email she received on Jan. 25 inviting her to participate in an “off-the-record” conversation about the “current state” of American Jewish life. The invitation came from an esteemed professor at Brandeis, where Sigalow had received her PhD, and one of the four…
BOSTON (JTA) – To prepare for Passover, Sam Greene is deep-cleaning his dorm room in keeping with the standards of his Orthodox Jewish family. Lena Ben-Gideon is compiling readings about immigration to supplement her haggadah. And Juliana Sherer is casting her friends in a dramatic performance of “Had Gadya,” the song that plays a prominent…
When Rachel Wainer Apter told her three children that she had just been nominated as a justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court, they were overwhelmed with excitement. “They laughed, they cried, and they screamed – all at the same time,” Apter, an Orthodox Jew and resident of Englewood, NJ, told the Forward in an…
What are the Jewish languages? Some are well known — Hebrew is the language of the Torah and of Israel, and Yiddish was the language of the shtetls and the great centers of European Jewish culture. Ladino was the language of the Jews of Spain and the Ottoman diaspora. But what about Judeo-Malayalam, spoken by…
Youssef Mahboubian was in his home garage gathering tools for his backyard garden when his murderer struck. The 104 year-old Iranian Jewish immigrant was in strong physical shape and regulalrly tended to his garden at his large Encino, California home, his nephew Sam Shakib told the Forward. Mahboubian’s home is located on a quiet cul-de-sac…
(JTA) — To immigrate to Israel from Ethiopia, Pnina Tamano-Shata’s family had to trek on foot through the desert to Sudan in the middle of a famine. Later, the truck bringing her mother and two of her sisters to the airfield broke down. It wasn’t until the plane doors closed that Tamano-Shata realized that they…
Ahead of Israel’s unprecedented fourth election in two years, Forward Editor-in-Chief Jodi Rudoren was joined by American-Israeli author Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute; Tamar Hermann, a public opinion specialist at the Israel Democracy Institute; Jay Ruderman, president of the Ruderman Family Foundation; and Jacob Kornbluh, the Forward’s senior political…
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