New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio blamed “the Jewish community” for a Brooklyn funeral procession that broke social distancing rules, yet New York City police officers helped arrange the event, the Forward has learned. De Blasio said he has been clear with religious Jews and everyone else that no gatherings will be tolerated until…
BOSTON (JTA) – Nearly three decades ago, Burton Rose, a highly regarded kidney specialist and professor at Harvard Medical School, turned a rejection by the publisher of his medical textbook into a new venture that ultimately transformed the way medical practitioners work. In 1992, Rose launched UptoDate after the publisher of his seminal book, “Clinical…
Controversy erupted on Tuesday night after thousands of people in Brooklyn marched in a funeral procession, in violation of social distancing rules, honoring a late rabbi affiliated with the Satmar sect of Haredi Orthodox Judaism (sometimes referred to as “Ultra-Orthodox”). The Satmars are adherents of Hasidism, a mystical branch of Orthodox Judaism with dozens of…
(JTA) — Rabbi Kenneth Roseman was always doing something outside the constructs of a traditional rabbinic career. The Corpus Christi rabbi, who held a doctorate in American Jewish history from Hebrew Union College, created a series of 20 to 30 minute that he made freely available on YouTube, describing them as a gift. He was…
In late April, 2,000 surgical masks and 1,000 medical-grade plastic face shields arrived on the reservation of the Dine/Navajo Nation — enough to protect all medical personnel and first responders on the reservation. The unlikely sender? A half-Navajo, half-Jewish-led nonprofit. Indigenous Bridges forges relationships between diaspora Jewish communities and indigenous communities in North America, the…
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio issued a message to the “Jewish community” Tuesday night after several hundred people attended the funeral for a Satmar rabbi in Williamsburg, prompting Jews and allies outside the insular world of the Satmar sect to condemn the mayor for his generalization. In a string of tweets, the mayor…
AMSTERDAM (JTA) — Tedje van der Sluis lived by her loving husband’s side since she was a teenager. The couple, both Holocaust survivors from Amsterdam, had been inseparable since 1945, when they met at a Jewish orphanage. But Tedje, who suffered from dementia, was when alone when she died on April 11 of the coronavirus…
(JTA) — Sidney Fleischer came into the world just prior to one of the worst pandemics in history — the 1918 flu pandemic that killed as many as 50 million people worldwide. And he left the world in the midst of another. Fleischer died of COVID-19 on April 7 in Boston. He was 102. Fleischer…
The New York State Assembly is calling on city and state health departments and city hospitals to begin a program that would allow volunteers with coronavirus antibodies to visit COVID patients, according to a joint letter signed by assembly members and city council members Kalman Yeger and Chaim Deutsch. “We propose that your hospitals create…
RIO DE JANEIRO (JTA) — Altamiro Zimerfogel, a longtime Jewish community activist, died on April 28 of the coronavirus. He was 80. Born in Rio to Polish Jewish immigrants who fled the Nazis in the 1930s, Zimerfogel had presided over the Brazilian Israelite Club for nearly a decade. Commonly known as CIB, the club, located…
Jewish life is now, officially, Zoom life. The meetings, meals, ceremonies, seminars, concerts, debates, panels and classes that defined Jewish life have, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, migrated to Zoom and other teleconference apps (but mostly to Zoom). Unfortunately, too many of us aren’t quite ready for prime time. What’s the right camera angle? What…
