Lex Rofeberg was a junior in college and thinking about becoming a rabbi when he hit a roadblock: he was dating a non-Jew. A representative from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, the Reform movement’s seminary, visited Brown University to talk to prospective students, and was questioned by a fellow student about a policy Rofeberg…
For National Bagels and Lox Day, which recognizes one of America’s favorite bagel combinations, we asked 10 of New York City’s leading mayoral candidates what they put on their favorite bagel type. Perhaps to nobody’s surprise, the eight candidates who responded to our questionnaire were split on their choices. In line with the classic Jewish…
(JTA) — Jason Stein was the kind of guy who would drop anything to help a friend. A lifelong educator, Stein had worked with countless kids as a sports coach, physical education teacher and most recently as the athletic director at J.P. Taravella High School in Coral Springs, Florida. His wife, Michele, also an education…
Block Club Chicago is a nonprofit newsroom focused on Chicago’s neighborhoods. Subscribe to support their on-the-ground reporting here. Neighbors are pushing for a Northwest Side park to be renamed after an influential German-Jewish author and poet who died in the Holocaust. Kolmar Park, 4143 N. Kolmar Ave., is named for the street on which it…
Jonah Sanderson expects to get a Masters Degree in Jewish Studies this year from a Los Angeles rabbinical seminary. Not especially noteworthy— until you learn that Sanderson, 32, has had lifelong struggles with learning disabilities. Although it was founded 18 years ago, the Academy of Jewish Religion in Los Angeles, which Sanderson attends, didn’t receive…
For Sarah Kats, the 35-year-old spiritual leader of the Chabad Jewish Centre of Saskatoon, the drive to the closest mikveh in Edmonton, Alberta, takes six hours. She is one of about 250 Jews in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan; population 331,000. Her commute may soon become significantly shorter, though, as Saskatoon is one of seven remote Jewish communities…
(JTA) — For much of the last year, the young mothers of Lakewood, New Jersey, have experienced the pandemic as much as a nuisance as a matter of life and death. That’s not to say the community hasn’t experienced its share of outbreaks; it has. Or that families haven’t lost loved ones; they have. But…
(JTA) — How and where do Jews fit into America’s minority communities? That’s the question at the center of a debate that has raged for more than a year over new school curriculum guides that are being adopted in California. Lawmakers there required the creation of an ethnic studies curriculum, and the effort to fulfill…
Andrew Yang said he would not take action to boost secular education in yeshivas if elected mayor of New York City, staking out a position likely to win him support in Brooklyn’s Orthodox communities. “As mayor, I will always respect religious freedom including the freedom of parents to do what’s best for their kids educationally,”…
At first, Alex Rapaport didn’t notice the chicken wings had disappeared. After a week, Rapaport, the director of Masbia, a kosher soup kitchen in Brooklyn, figured he could just find another supplier of the popular and inexpensive item. But poultry plants kept punting — demand was soaring in advance of the Super Bowl and nobody…
Myra Friedman clicked on the video, and there it was: the old neighborhood, the high school clubs, the gray jackets with pink lettering, the shopping trips to Woolworth’s and Kresge’s, the multiple synagogues. The 1950s and ‘60s in Jewish Chicago were back, in a documentary playing on her computer in L.A., and on laptops, tablets,…
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