Elementary school students at Hillel Academy of Pittsburgh had a few surprise guests during recess: Mayor Bill Peduto and two police officers newly assigned to protect the Jewish school. “I wanted to introduce you to two of my friends,” Peduto told the children in the play area on Monday afternoon. “They’re Pittsburgh police officers. They’re…
PITTSBURGH — One was a sprightly 97-year-old who was a regular sight walking around her Pittsburgh neighborhood. Another was a big hearted retired accountant who did folks’ tax returns for free — and helped collect clothes for a black church after Hurricane Florence struck. Two were grown brothers who were mentally challenged and had a…
When the Reconstructionist movement voted two years ago to admit rabbinical students with non-Jewish partners or spouses to their seminary, the move triggered a wave of intense reaction, but little surprise at its provenance. After all, Reconstructionism — American Judaism’s smallest and youngest movement — has been over the course of its history the source…
There are three Conservative Jewish congregations in Pittsburgh’s heavily Jewish Squirrel Hill neighborhood. Two of the congregations, both based in the building of the Tree of Life synagogue, were attacked Saturday by an anti-Semitic gunman who killed eleven people. It is unclear when they’ll be allowed to return to their building, which is still an…
Judah Samet was four minutes late to synagogue. Services at Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh start at 9:45 A.M. Samet, who is 80 years old, pulled into a handicapped spot in front of the building on the morning of October 27 at 9:49. “Somebody knocked on my window,” Samet said the next day. “There…
Jews all over the world unfurled their holy scrolls to chant aloud the exact same section of the Torah yesterday, as they do every Shabbat. On October 27, it was the story of Abraham’s hospitality, and how he rushed to throw open his tent to three visitors who turned out to be angels. So it…
All over Pittsburgh on Saturday afternoon, Jews are waiting to hear which of their friends were murdered this morning at a synagogue in the leafy neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, and which survived. “My friends have been killed and I don’t who they are,” said Harold Caplan, the treasurer of one of the three Jewish congregations…
A gunman shouting “all these Jews must die” killed at least 11 people and wounded several others at a Pittsburgh synagogue during Shabbat services Saturday morning before being captured alive. In what is thought to be the first-ever mass shooting at an American synagogue, a “bearded heavy-set white male” identified as Robert Bowers, 46, walked…
One of the U.S. charities that the Forward exposed as a funder of the online blacklist Canary Mission is trying to distance itself from the website, but alumni of its teen program say it isn’t going far enough. In a letter, senior staff of the Helen Diller Family Foundation acknowledged the foundation’s grant in support…
The surprise email from Rabbi Rick Jacobs, leader of 2.2 million Reform Jews, arrived in the inboxes of Temple Oheb Shalom’s members just before Shabbat. The Baltimore congregation was in crisis, less than two days away from deciding whether to fire their senior rabbi of nearly two decades for unspecified violations of the Reform movement’s…
For years, Beth Lesser and her husband had longed to care for foster children at their home in Greenville, South Carolina. But when she attended a training session for a child-mentoring program, Lesser found out that the largest state-funded foster care program in the area only works with prospective parents and mentors who are Protestant…
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