Read this article in Yiddish Well before the rest of the world was talking about blood plasma and its use in fighting coronavirus, Dr. Shmuel Shoham knew all about it — and where he could probably get a lot of it. By early March, Shoham, an expert on infectious diseases in transplant patients at Johns…
(JTA) — Benjamin Levin spent much of his early life fighting. At just 14, he joined a militant group fighting the Nazis in his native Lithuania. After the war, he worked to smuggle Jewish refugees to pre-state Israel. And in 1948, he arrived on the shores of the newly established Jewish state aboard the Altalena,…
(JTA) — Michael Sorkin never thought small. In 2001, the Washington, D.C.-born architect offered a comprehensive blueprint for turning East Jerusalem into the capital of a Palestinian state. He followed up that proposal a year later with a book, “The Next Jerusalem: Sharing the Divided City,” an examination on how urban planning could facilitate peace…
In another era, the nomination of Dianne Lob as incoming chair of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations would have likely gone smoothly and unopposed, viewed as a standard changing of the guard in the world of Jewish organizations. But as the pitched battle over the Trump administration’s immigration policies rages, Lob…
At 8 p.m. on April 9, Igor García, a young Venezuelan violinist, stepped on to his balcony in Madrid and played “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem. The beautiful rendition received an ovation from his neighbors, and a video of the performance went viral. Garcia, who is not Jewish, said he always felt a strong connection…
(JTA) — Fred Pressner, a former president of the Venezuelan Jewish community, died April 18 of COVID-19. He was 73. Born in Romania to survivors of the Holocaust, Pressner emigrated to Venezuela in 1960. He would go on to assume the presidency of the Confederation of Israelite Associations of Venezuela, the country’s umbrella of Jewish…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — While Mark Steiner may have been one of the most important philosophers of mathematics of the past half century, it was his warmth, humor and love of Judaism that most endeared him to his colleagues. The Hebrew University professor died of COVID-19 on April 6. He was 77. Born in the Bronx…
(JTA) — Noach Dear, a longtime New York City Council member representing largely Orthodox areas of Brooklyn, died April 19 in New York of complications related to COVID-19. He was 66. Dear was elected to the council in 1983 representing sections of Midwood, Bensonhurst and Borough Park that were heavily populated with Orthodox Jews. Dear…
Pre-coronavirus, you could walk into a trifecta of Jewish delis, all within a seven-mile strip of South Dixie Highway, to get a sense of which way Miami Jews are leaning on Trump v. Biden. But now that the ground zero of the Jewish kibitzing scene is off-limits due to social distancing, you have to do…
(JTA) — Evelyne Cohen led a comfortable life before fleeing her native Tunisia after it won independence from France in the late 1950s. The daughter of a prominent merchant, she had grown up in a large house in the port city of Sfax, a member of the Jewish community’s elite. But when her family, buffeted…
(JTA) — When Robert Podgursky was a boy, his father piled him and his brother into the car and headed north from their home in Louisville, Kentucky. Their destination was Toronto, where a relative from the old country had settled. Armed with little more than an address and an unshakeable sense of mission, Salomon Podgursky…
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