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Satmar Group Endorses Bill de Blasio for Mayor, Setting Stage for Election Day Battle
The political leaders of half of Brooklyn’s Satmar Hasidic community announced they would back New York City Democratic mayoral frontrunner Bill de Blasio today, setting the stage for an epic get-out-the-vote showdown in Williamsburg next week. “All in all we felt it’s a no-brainer, the shidduch between him and us,” said Isaac Sofer, a leader…
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The Great Shtibl Revival of Hungary
In a nondescript apartment building in Budapest’s Eighth District, Rabbi Sholom Hurwitz stands behind a wooden podium and claps out the beat to a raucous Sephardic melody. About 30 people, most of them men, pray together in the flat’s main sanctuary, a small living room that the congregants affectionately call their shtibl — from the…
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Jewish Shtetl Survives in Heart of Muslim Azerbaijan
(JTA) — Even at 70, Yedidia Yehuda can negotiate a narrow mountain path in northern Azerbaijan with a confidence easily mistaken for carelessness. “You take care not to fall yourself and don’t worry about me,” he tells a visitor following him toward a small town on the northern bank of the Kudyal river, where 2,000…
The Latest
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Rabbis Declare War on Chit-Chat in Synagogue
Chat during synagogue services and God might kill you, the Talmud warns. That’s if you’re lucky. If you’re not, God might kill everyone you know: One legend attributes a 17th-century Cossack slaughter of tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews to excessive talking in synagogue. “Woe to people who carry on conversations during prayer, for we…
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Path To Boosting Jewish Charity Giving Lies in Community Involvement
What’s the best way to squeeze charitable dollars out of Jews? A new study suggests it could be to make sure that they’re involved in a Jewish community. Jewish charities complain that shrinking donor pools and tighter-fisted younger Jews are threatening the viability of the Jewish not-for-profit ecosystem. Yet a September 3 study from Jumpstart,…
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Yelena Goltsman Pushes for Gay Rights Boycott of Russia’s Olympics
A Ukrainian immigrant who arrived stateside in 1990 with her husband, children and mother, Yelena Goltsman was deeply closeted when she joined Manhattan’s gay and lesbian synagogue, Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in 1995. Today, the media executive leads RUSA LGBT, a New York-based support group for Russian-speaking gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. She has…
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Laurel Bellows Is Above the Law
Sometimes when Laurel Bellows stands with her husband at a convention, she’ll see someone point in the couple’s direction and say, “Oh, look, there’s the president of the American Bar Association!” At that point, more than one attorney eager to meet the head of the nearly 400,000-member organization has marched right up to Joel Bellows…
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Jewish Fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi Marks 100 Years Amid Sweeping Culture Changes
Many kegs have been tapped since the night of November 7, 1913, when 11 Jewish students gathered at New York University to found the first official chapter of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity. Over the next 100 years, the organization, most commonly known as AEPi, would grow — from a small sanctuary for ostracized Jews…
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My Iftar Dinner With Shimon Peres
Following a night in Ramallah when I joined the Muslims for Iftar, the dinner meal for breaking the fast on Ramadan, I got into a van that goes to Jerusalem. Two ladies with the most gorgeous hijabs sat next to me. I looked at them and noticed that Palestinian hijabs are very well made. Much…
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Does Zionism Have a Future With Jews?
Forward Looking Back brings you the stories that were making news in the Forward’s Yiddish paper 100, 75, and 50 years ago. Check back each week for a new set of illuminating, edifying and sometimes wacky clippings from the Jewish past. 1913 •100 years ago The Tragedy of Zionism As the curtain rises on the…
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Leo Frank Case Stirs Debate 100 Years After Jewish Lynch Victim’s Conviction
A century ago, Cobb County, Ga., was a sleepy farming community outside Atlanta, home to about 25,000 people. Now the county is an affluent suburb with a population of 700,000, including a booming Jewish community of about 8,000 families served by four synagogues, two restaurants doling out bagels and deli food, and a Kroger supermarket…
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