It’s a simple gravestone, a small, ground-level marker identical to the four stones beside it. Nothing about the inscription, “Semper Idem” —“ Always the same” — hints at the significance of this 31-year-old man’s untimely death. But here, at the edge of Mount Carmel Cemetery, in New York City, 100 feet from traffic streaming by…
Leo Frank had no children. But the Jewish lynching victim’s descendants include nieces, nephews and their children — who were kept in the dark about their famous relative’s 1915 murder. Cathee Smithline was 18 when her mother, who was Frank’s niece, handed her a 1965 book about the infamous case entitled “A Little Girl Is…
Within a few hours on August 6, New York’s two U.S. Democratic senators took sides on the heated debate over the nuclear deal with Iran. Kirsten Gillibrand, the junior senator, announced she’d vote for the controversial agreement. Chuck Schumer, the veteran who is slated to take over next year as Democratic leader of the Senate,…
The first thing I noticed about Shahab Shahamifar as we strolled to synagogue on a Saturday morning in July was his yarmulke. It was a medium-size, black knitted one, and he was wearing it as we walked the busy streets of Tehran. Then I noticed that no one looked up. Later, when the rabbi went…
Hoping to “wipe the slate clean,” Hillel International’s president and CEO Eric Fingerhut stepped into the lion’s den Monday for a face-to-face meeting with campus leaders of the dovish lobby J Street. Although he sounded all the right notes, Fingerhut offered little in the way of substance to mend the rift between Hillel, the national…
The following is a translation by Chana Pollack of the Yiddish Forverts coverage of the lynching of Leo Frank on August 17, 1915 Atlanta, August 17, 1915 — A telephone dispatch was received today at 55 minutes past 8 in the morning reporting that Leo Frank was lynched in Marietta (Marietta is the town where…
(JTA) — One rainy afternoon earlier this summer, Rabbi Gabe Greenberg stood on the backyard patio of the new Beth Israel synagogue telling the story of the deluge that destroyed the Orthodox congregation’s Lakeview neighborhood building. Most of the now 111-year-old synagogue’s possessions were ruined by the 10 feet of water that filled the premises…
A former county health official claims he has identified a source for herpes infections in ultra-Orthodox baby boys — and it’s not metzitzah b’peh, the controversial ritual in which a mohel uses his lips to suction blood from the circumcision wound. New York City health officials blame metzitzah b’peh, or MBP, for infecting 17 Jewish…
“Leo M. Frank Kidnapped and Lynched.” That’s how readers of the Yiddish Forverts learned on August 17, 1915, of the shocking murder of Leo Frank. Frank’s arrest and trial two years previously in Atlanta on charges of rape and murder gripped America’s Jewish community. It gripped the Forverts too. This newspaper’s founding editor, Abraham Cahan,…
In a country where residential ZIP codes have long dictated public school zoning, the education reform movement in recent years has also brought to the forefront a notion of school choice in which families can decide where to send their children to school on public dollars, regardless of where they live. Charter schools, which are…
Just in time for back-to-school this fall, a New York politician is trying to pass a bill that would require Mayor Bill de Blasio to fund the same security in private schools that public schools have access to already. City Councilman David Greenfield sponsored the bill, known as Intro 65, to address what he saw…
