France plans to start discussions with partners in the “coming weeks” on a United Nations Security Council resolution to lay out the parameters for ending the Middle East conflict, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said on Friday. “I hope that the partners who were reluctant will not be reluctant anymore,” said Fabius, referring to the…
A summer camp I attended as a teenager has lately been burning up my Facebook feed. A couple of weekends ago, some of my childhood friends in Toronto paid $100 a ticket to attend a dinner in honor of Camp Solelim’s 50th anniversary. It sounded, from their posts, like they had fun reminiscing and reverting…
Danny Schechter, the self-described progenitor of “participatory journalism” who died March 19, first burst onto my radar screen back in the late 1970s, when I was working at WBAI-FM, the left-leaning community-sponsored radio station. One day, while laboring there, I heard a news story come in from Boston with an inordinate amount of reggae music…
Tom Chai Sosnik stood in front of his eighth-grade class, flecks of rainbow colored hair visible beneath his blue yarmulke, as he was wrapped in a tallit for the very first time. His classmates stood and chanted together, “Baruch HaBah [“Welcome”]” three times, and then ran forward, enveloping him in a big, messy hug. Tom’s…
A fund to assist parents who cannot afford to pay day school tuition has been established in memory of the seven children who died in a Shabbat house fire in Brooklyn. The Sassoon Children Memorial Fund will be administered by the New York-based Jewish Communal Fund. In addition, according to Yeshiva World News, a Torah…
Every Friday before sundown, in countless observant Jewish homes across the United States, someone turns on a hot plate or a gas stovetop, and then doesn’t turn it off again for twenty-five hours. The practice is so common that it blends into the background of traditionally observant Jewish life. But since a malfunctioning Sabbath hot…
My college study-abroad term in Montevideo, Uruguay, left me with reasonable fluency in Spanish, a fear of slugs in sandwiches, the knowledge of more than a dozen soccer chants — and a deep, visceral love for the Jewish holiday of Passover and its accompanying festive Seder meal. The year before I lived in Uruguay, I’d…
It was a gala reminiscent of the good old days of Jewish organizational philanthropy. When leaders of the Israeli American Council described the new community center they intend to build for Israeli expats in the San Fernando Valley, and the $10 million price tag that comes with it, hands were raised from the audience that…
Rabbi William Tepper is a leader in both our congregation and our community. He came to us after 15 years as a high school dramatic arts and English teacher and community theater director in Toronto, Ontario. Then, he, with the support of his wife Deborah Tepper, decided to study for the rabbinate — not an…
Rabbi Wayne Franklin, the senior rabbi of our congregation of over 750 families, embodies the multiple and diverse skills that a rabbi must have in order to connect with congregants and lead the synagogue community in an effective way. Rabbi Franklin accepts congregants and other members of the Jewish community on their, not his, terms….
The Shalom Center is a national organization, so its community reaches across the U.S. But though the thousands who are inspired by Rabbi Arthur Waskow to fulfill the mitzvot of tzedakah and tikkun olam may live many miles apart, they form a community dedicated to core Jewish values of caring and healing. For that ever-growing…
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