Three weeks ago, Aaron Jacobs, an Emergency Medical Technician with the San Francisco Fire Department, was dispatched to the Jewish Home for the Aged in San Francisco’s Mission District. “We got a call from there, it’s a huge facility,” Jacobs said, “and they wanted this patient, a woman, evaluated for Coronavirus. She’d spiked a fever…
A prominent Reform synagogue in Manhattan found itself on the defensive over the weekend when some congregants protested its decision to highlight the Covid-19 response efforts of an evangelical Christian organization whose politics they abhor. The group, Samaritan’s Purse, has set up a field hospital in Central Park, and Central Synagogue featured the group in…
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Stanley Chera, the friend of Donald Trump whose coronavirus infection was an inflection point in making the virus tangible for the president, has died. News reports said that Chera died April 11. He was 78. My deepest sympathies go out to Frieda Chera and the family of the late, great, Stanley Chera,…
NEW YORK (JTA) — Hal Willner might have been the most willfully strange person in show business. The music producer, who died April 7 at age 64 of complications of coronavirus, had a magic touch. He could get anyone to do anything: Tom Waits to sing an unrecognizable, railroad-rough version of “Heigh Ho” from Disney’s…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron, who served as Israel’s chief Sephardic rabbi for a decade beginning in 1993, died April 12 after being admitted to the hospital for treatment of COVID-19. He was 79. “Rabbi Bakshi-Doron was a teacher for all Jewish communities in Israel and around the world,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said…
(JTA) — Martin Fox was a news junky who devoured the New York Times, following public affairs with a keen interest until his final days. He was also deeply involved in Jewish communal affairs, serving as president of the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest NJ (then known as the Jewish Community Federation of Metropolitan New…
No one has been left unscathed from the effect of the coronavirus, from storeowners to rock-and-roll guitarists. Los Angeles-based writer and photographer Ayala Or-El captured some of the stories shared by members of the L.A. Jewish community. Sean Hurwitz, guitar player for the band Smash Mouth The news that his livelihood is in jeopardy caught…
In less than a week, Larry Freedman was called to fight the coronavirus epidemic on two different fronts. As a religious school director in Pittsburgh, Rabbi Freedman was tasked with moving an entire curriculum online after most public spaces were shuttered due to the virus in late March. Just a few days later, he was…
Back when I was in high school in New Rochelle, N.Y., I would transform every Tuesday during religious school at Temple Israel into “Oscar Lasagna.” It was my clown name, which I earned by enrolling in the goofiest elective possible: Jewish medical clowning. I went on to clown regularly in children’s hospitals, both in the…
It is Wednesday at noon, just hours before the Passover holiday begins, at the Reserve Shopping Center in Boca Raton, Flor. Inside the cars lined up in neat rows outside Ben’s Deli, masked customers patiently wait for their kosher Passover Package — matzo, roasted chicken or brisket, haroset, the works. No one dares enter the…
COVID-19, the disease outbreak caused by the new coronavirus, has already pushed health care systems to their limits. Overburdened American doctors may have to rely on triage, a system of prioritizing patients — and ultimately, lives — over one another. Looking from the outside, triage medicine can appear heartless and arbitrary. For doctors, it can…
