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Teetering on the Edge of the Mikveh
The Seesaw is a new kind of advice column in which a a broad range of columnists will address the real life issues faced by interfaith couples and families. Join the discussion by commenting on this post, sharing it on Facebook or following the Forward on Twitter. And keep the questions coming. You can email…
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Observant Women Make Tzitzit — and Stir Controversy
Since biblical times, male authorities have been debating the issue of whether women should sport tzitzit. Now, thanks to a freshman from Princeton University, a group of young women are — quite literally — taking this fiddly law into their own hands. Maya Rosen, 19, has been wearing tzitzit for three years, making her own…
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‘Fourth Matzo’ for Passover Symbolizes Freedom Struggle of African Immigrants
From whence my nostalgia for the fourth matzo? A relic of the 1980s, the fourth matzo was added to the already crowded Seder plate as an expression of solidarity with oppressed Jews in the Soviet Union. In most homes, when the ’80s ended and Glasnost took off, the fourth matzo went the way of Betamax,…
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Telling Story of Holocaust’s Horrors Through Ultra-Orthodox Eyes
Is it permissible to show images of Jewish women with their heads shaved but without a head covering as they walk towards Nazi gas chambers? This is the type of question faced by organizers of the first Holocaust museum to be aimed specifically at Orthodox Jews. Elly Kleinman, the Orthodox businessman behind the project, sought…
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Passover-Minded Synagogue Prepares To Sweep All Hametz From Its Inboxes
It happens every year, around this time. Jews start to wage war against hametz, or leavened food, by scouring cupboards and countertops, turning pockets inside out, dusting off books one page at a time — anything to rid the house of the offending particles before Passover. Now, a New York synagogue has taken this cleansing…
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Tiny Greek Community of Ioannina Struggles To Keep Romaniote Traditions Alive
(JTA) — When the Jews of Ioannina gathered in their whitewashed-stone synagogue over the weekend, it was to commemorate 70 years since the Nazis destroyed their community. But the March 30 gathering also served to highlight a source of present-day sadness: the withering of the unique 2,300 year-old Romaniote Jewish tradition. Ioannina, a postcard-pretty town…
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Final Four Goes Jewish at Hillel March Madness
(JTA) — Dribbling blurs across four parallel basketball courts, the players who came for the National Hillel Basketball Tournament filled a football field-size gymnasium in a marathon of games. Forty-one teams and 300 players from colleges across the United States came to the University of Maryland campus last weekend for the tournament’s fourth incarnation in…
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Kosher Soup Kitchen Struggles With Rising Ranks of Hungry as Passover Nears
On a recent chilly afternoon in Queens, two women shivered in a line of about 50 people that trailed out the door of Masbia, a kosher food pantry and soup kitchen. The first woman, from Manhattan, wore baggy pants. The other, from Queens, was clad in a long, draping skirt. Their outfits signaled differences in…
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Y.U. Students File Appeal in $680M Abuse Suit
A federal judge was “spectacularly wrong” to toss out a $680 million lawsuit brought by former students who say they were abused decades ago at Yeshiva University’s Manhattan high school for boys, a lawyer for the students said. “It would shock me to not prevail on appeal,” an attorney for the former students, Kevin Mulhearn,…
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Orthodox Singers Find Creative Voice by Performing for Other Women Only
Talia Lakritz, 20, a Modern Orthodox Jewish sophomore at Barnard College, and her two girlfriends got off a very crowded No. 3 train at Kingston Avenue in a fevered hurry of glee, as they headed to an open-mic night for women at the gallery at The Creative Soul, an organization in the Crown Heights section…
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Kosher Chili Cook-Off Builds Jewish Unity Deep in Heart of Texas
“You want to try the Republican chili?” That’s the kind of invitation I got, repeatedly, from many of the 50 contestants at this year’s Dallas Kosher Chili Cookoff. And after trying the Republican Jewish Coalition’s surprisingly garlicky spoonful, I faced a Jewish institutional smorgasbord. Whose culinary sensibilities would I sample next — those of the…
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