(JTA) — When Alison Schwartz set out to find a gift for her best friend’s wedding in 2018, she did it with her trademark creativity and fastidiousness. The idea was to make a 42-square-foot quilt with all 1,450 words of the couple’s wedding vows hand stitched on the underside. But Schwartz was a perfectionist, and…
JERUSALEM — Prior to the outbreak of the current COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Beth Kava used to fly to the United States every month for at least two weeks. An American pediatric endocrinologist who immigrated to Israel and is now living in the West Bank settlement of Efrat, Kava runs a private medical practice in Margate,…
Orthodox women are anxious to pray in synagogues once more, but New York’s new guidelines for resuming religious services may leave them out in the cold. On a recent Shabbat evening, Laura Shaw Frank took a walk with her husband through their neighborhood in the Bronx. Their route took them past the shuttered doors of…
BOSTON (JTA) – When Lee Kozol entered Harvard Law School in the 1950s, he was following along a well-worn path of familial achievement. Kozol was born into a multigenerational family of prominent Boston-area Jewish lawyers. His brother, Joel, was also a Harvard alum, and both brothers served as editors of the prestigious Harvard Law Review….
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Suzy Levy was the head nurse at the Ear, Nose and Throat Department at Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv. On April 27, she became the first Israeli medical worker to fall victim to the coronavirus pandemic, just two weeks after the virus claimed the life of her sister. Levy was 66…
There was a typhus pandemic, concurrent with an outbreak of cholera and widespread famine. There were bread riots everywhere, the country was under foreign occupation and overrun by refugees from other war-torn countries. This was 78 years ago in Tehran during the Second World War. Food, heating oil, and other essentials were rationed. Bakers were…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — One dark evening in the 1990s, Robert Ullian snuck out of his home in the mixed Jewish and Arab neighborhood of Abu Tor and marked out the route of the Green Line, the boundary splitting pre-1967 Israel from the West Bank, with green spray paint. A longtime advocate of Israeli-Palestinian coexistence, Ullian…
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced during a Wednesday press conference that worshipers will be able to resume religious gatherings of no more than 10 people starting Thursday, but some rabbis aren’t sure if they’re ready to open. While some Jewish and other faith leaders pushed for this move, others were caught off guard by…
Orthodox synagogues in Los Angeles present a united front against spread of COVID-19
For Jay Sanderson, it got personal. Last month, the COVID-19 virus claimed his mentally disabled twin brother, Jeffrey, who was living in a group home outside Boston. When it was clear Jeffrey wouldn’t survive the infection, doctors told Jay that his brother had about 24 hours to live. He lasted another four days and died…
New York City’s Ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods are not among those hardest hit by coronavirus despite the widespread perception that they have higher rates of infection, according to data released Monday by the city’s Department of Health. The data track cases and deaths across New York City’s roughly 70 ZIP codes from Feb. 29 to May 19….
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