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…
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…
“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…
The United States is starting to reopen, but a broad range of Jewish leaders are citing religious values to say that synagogues should be among the last places to do so. And compounds the uncertainty around the High Holidays, which happen in the fall and are the peak season of the Jewish year. Will American…
UJA-Federation of New York and Brightpoint Health, a community health center, are offering COVID-19 testing in schools and a playground in Brooklyn and the Bronx starting Friday. The testing is by appointment only, and patients must be showing symptoms and have a temperature above 100.5 degrees, or must be essential workers. “Testing is a critical…
First he was accused of anti-Semitism for his crackdown on a Hasidic funeral last week in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Days later he navigated claims of racism after the New York Police Department made violent arrests of young men of color for not following social distancing regulations. On Thursday night, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office released data…
געוויסע עקספּערטן האַלטן, אַז מע דאַרף באַטראַכטן ל״ג־בעומר ווי אַ פֿרילינגדיקן מײַ־פֿעסטיוואַל
