Catholic leaders in Bosnia and Herzegovina are planning to say what many observers see as a mass for the perpetrators of World War II atrocities against Jews, a decision that has outraged the Sarajevo Jewish community. The Bishops Conference of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Archdiocese of Vrhbosna, which oversees the Catholic faithful in the…
About 2,000 years ago, Judaism swapped animal sacrifice for prayer. This fall, it will face another challenge that, while not quite on the order of the destruction of the Second Temple, is still historic: How to conduct the faith’s holiest — and best-attended — services while maintaining enough physical distance between congregants to prevent the…
The Anti-Defamation League released its annual audit of anti-Semitic incidents on Tuesday. The watchdog group documented 2,107 anti-Semitic incidents to have taken place in 2019 – a 12% increase from the previous year and the highest number on record since the organization began tracking such incidents in 1979. Here are some of the key takeaways:…
Police broke up a gathering of about 100 Orthodox Jews in Borough Park celebrating a minor Jewish festival Monday night, according to an eyewitness and the New York Police Department. The source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of alienating his neighbors, said he heard loud music outside and walked down the…
When 26 year-old Yehuda Blonder contracted COVID-19 at a Purim party, he knew it would be bad, he just didn’t know how bad. Blonder has familial dysautonomia (FD), a rare genetic disease with an increased incidence among Jews of Ashkenazi descent. It affects involuntary motion, leading to problems with breath control, blood pressure and the…
RIO DE JANEIRO (JTA) — Abraham Palatnik, a famed Brazilian Jewish artist who explored the role of movement in art, died May 9 of COVID-19 in Rio. He was 92. Palatnik was one the pioneers of kinetic art, a branch of fine arts that explores the visual effects of physical movements and optical illusions. His…
NEW YORK (JTA) — Deborah Kantor Nagler’s life as a Jewish educator began when she was just a teenager. At 19, she took a group of 14- and 15-year old students from her synagogue in St. Louis, to Israel for the summer. She would go on to earn two master’s degrees in education — one…
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio personally called Orthodox leaders asking them to support his effort to retain control over the city’s schools in exchange for soft-balling a probe into the state of secular education at yeshivas, according to internal emails obtained by the New York Post. The emails from late June support a report,…
Lining up participants for The Great Big Jewish Food Fest has been the easiest experience with event planning Jeffrey Yoskowitz has ever had. “Not a single person we’ve asked has said a flat out ‘no,’”Yoskowitz said, “everyone has said ‘I’m in, I want to be part of it.’” Yoskowitz is the coauthor of the “The…
“I always say that I was born to live.” Helen Grun Moss As an oral historian for 30 years, I’ve interviewed many Holocaust survivors, and for most, Mother’s and Father’s Day are a painful reminder of parents who were murdered, as well as a joyful celebration of the miracle of being parents themselves. This was…
There we were, on the third day of camp in summer 2012, trying to get the bunk ready for Shabbat: me, unprepared for what was happening in skin-tight khakis and boat shoes; my friend David, a muscle-bound future Marine; a former Israeli special-forces soldier from the cabin next door whose name escapes me now; and…
100% of profits support our journalism
