Nearly 50 years after the Vatican officially proclaimed Jews free of guilt in the killing of Jesus, Pope Francis made a surprise change to his schedule on the final day of his U.S. tour to convey his own message of respect for the Jewish people. In an unannounced event, the pontiff stopped Sunday to bless…
A version of this article first appeared in Yiddish in the Forverts For years, the Beth Hamedrash Hagadol of Washington Heights, a large 99-year old Orthodox synagogue on 175th Street and Wadsworth Avenue, had barely been able to attract a minyan, the quorum of ten men required for worship. The 6 or 7 gray-haired veterans…
Ask the State Department whether it is any safer now for Americans to travel to Iran, and the answer you’ll get will be unequivocally negative. The nuclear deal reached with Tehran, as a State Department makes clear, “does not alter the United States’ assessment of the risks of travel to Iran for U.S. citizens.” But…
Who has a picture of Ruth Nelly Abraham? That intriguing headline, a plea from Holocaust survivor Inge Auerbacher, appeared in the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel on August 3. Auerbacher, 80, was looking for a picture of her childhood friend, Ruth Nelly Abraham, who was murdered at Auschwitz. Auerbacher hoped a picture would breathe new life…
(JTA) — John Boehner, the Republican from Ohio who is the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, is quitting politics. Now that he’s going, maybe Boehner may feel free to elaborate on his role in the secret that launched the ongoing U.S.-Israel crisis — and perhaps permanently changed the relationship between the two countries….
New York City has not only stopped requiring mohels to obtain written consent before performing a controversial circumcision rite — the city has also stopped alerting doctors and the public when it suspects that a mohel has infected a baby with herpes following the ritual, known as metzitzah b’peh or MBP. Between January 2013 and…
Over the past month and a half, residents of this tight-knit village in Israeli-occupied territory have oscillated between grief and anxiety. First came the July 31 death by arson of 18-month-old Ali Saad Dawabsheh as the lives of his other family members hung in the balance; then the death of Ali’s father, Saad Dawabsheh, from…
On an early summer Friday in 2012, David Gordon was exploring the Galilee Mountains, near Tzfat, on his own. An Israeli couple saw him — a friendly-looking 19-year-old — on the trail, and asked if he would take their picture. Gordon happily agreed, and by the end of the conversation, in typical Israeli fashion, he…
On Sunday, September 6, in the sunny yard of a London school, I met Erica, a weary middle-aged woman from Eritrea whom I was trying to help. Over a Styrofoam cup of milky tea, she described her life—an unrelenting limbo of food vouchers, hand-outs and the unpredictable whim of local neighborhood councils. An asylum seeker,…
Jews are unlikely to line the streets of the nation’s capital when Pope Francis arrives September 22, just as Yom Kippur begins, but the pontiff’s visit to the United States has nevertheless stirred interest and excitement among many members of the Jewish community. Through his official statements and in his personal gestures, Francis has come…
Conservative columnist Ann Coulter used an epithet to describe Jews in expressing frustration with pledges to support Israel during the most recent Republican debate. “How many f—ing Jews do these people think there are in the United States?” Coulter said on Twitter during the final minutes of the three-hour debate Wednesday evening, when four of…
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