Just three weeks before the start of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, two dozen Russian reporters, photographers and cameramen squeezed into the spartan first-floor office of the Independent Press Center in Moscow, a five-minute walk from the capital’s main Orthodox church, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The journalists were there to see Ilya…
Bobby and Chelle Medow are happily married — and have been for almost 50 years. Yet one Sunday evening in January, the St. Louis couple made contingency plans for a divorce. And 31 other Orthodox married couples joined them. They are part of a small but budding movement that is being promoted by some Orthodox…
Eliaz Cohen is a second-generation Jewish settler in the occupied West Bank — and that’s where he’s determined to remain. Sitting in his kitchen in Kfar Etzion, between Jerusalem and Hebron, the yarmulke-wearing settler says that he wants to see a two-state solution and to see his home become part of the Palestinian state, with…
Maimonides is trending these days. The 12th century sage, once confined to musty tomes and talmudic study halls, is being brandished in the opinion pages of The New York Times, cited on the airwaves in “This American Life,” and featured in Dara Horn’s latest novel. By some measures, Maimonides is at the height of his…
Who are you cheering for at the Winter Olympics? The pickings might seem pretty slim for Jewish athletes in Sochi. The Israeli delegation is only sending a five-member team and few Jewish athletes from around the world have surfaced at the top just yet. But the American team does have some young Jewish stars worth…
As with most sports, competitive figure skating at the Olympic level demands a single-minded focus and devotion that are all-consuming for most of the young men and women who attempt it. But 19-year-old Jason Brown has another life, within the Jewish community of his hometown of Highland Park, Ill., that complements this. In fact, noted…
(JTA) — Soft sand and turquoise beaches make Sochi a lovely holiday destination, but this coastal Russian city is less than ideal for providing religious services to thousands of Jewish tourists. With few native Jews and only one resident rabbi, the Black Sea resort of 400,000 residents would seem ill-equipped to handle the tens of…
Ultra-Orthodox leaders are targeting a new threat to their community: the smartphone messaging service WhatsApp. Orthodox Jews have swarmed this service ever since a 2012 anti-Internet campaign tightened communal restrictions against social networking sites like Facebook. Now, some leaders are launching a new crusade against WhatsApp, an SMS-like tool that allows users to share digital…
A few months into his rabbinical studies in Jerusalem in 2012, it struck Benjamin Ross how little Israelis seemed to know about American Jews like him. At the same time, the second-year Hebrew Union College student was mulling over the fraught, distanced relationships American Jews have with Israelis. “Many Americans have no concept of life…
It has been more than a year since New York City introduced a regulation requiring mohels to obtain written consent before performing a controversial rite that risks infecting infants with neonatal herpes. The regulation put Mayor Michael Bloomberg at loggerheads with the ultra-Orthodox community. And it promises to be a headache for his successor, Bill…
(Haaretz) — When 30-year-old Antonina Samecka returned to Poland after her first visit to Israel on Birthright, she wore a Magen David (Star of David) necklace. Her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, was shocked to see her, and asked that she take off the necklace from the Holy Land. Her grandmother believed it was still dangerous…
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