U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg, whose death has sparked a battle over his seat in the Senate, was remembered at his funeral on Wednesday as a tenacious fighter who battled tirelessly for the causes he championed. Vice President Joe Biden eulogized Lautenberg, a fellow Democrat who died on Monday at age 89, as having “both physical…
Anthony Weiner got a hero’s welcome as he returned to his old political home turf Tuesday night for a New York City mayoral forum aimed at the Orthodox community of Flatbush, Brooklyn. It took the disgraced ex-Congressman 20 minutes to get from the entrance of the building to the stage, as he stopped along the…
The future of Germany’s largest organized Jewish community is in question following a cutoff in its government support and a high-profile brawl that put its dysfunction on public display. The Berlin municipal government has terminated its subsidy to the city’s Juedische Gemeinde, or Jewish community, citing the community’s failure to properly document its budget needs….
An organization that declared its intent to bring transparency to charitable donations in Syrian Sephardic Jewish communities has gone silent three years after its inception. Shortly after the July 2009 arrests of three prominent Sephardic rabbis who had used charity funds in a money-laundering scheme, the Sephardic Community Federation instituted a compliance plan for charitable…
It was our 53rd wedding anniversary, which we celebrated with a special dinner at home, as we often did, and I had just poured steaming espresso into the blue-and-white translucent cups that we saved for very special occasions. As we sat down to sip our coffee, David looked at the demitasse cups and the pitcher…
Frank Lautenberg, the U.S. Senate’s oldest sitting senator and a former longtime Jewish community activist, died Monday morning at 89. Lautenberg represented New Jersey in the Senate from 1982 to 2001, and then again from 2003 until his death. He served in the 1970s as a top lay leader of the United Jewish Appeal, the…
New York’s mayoral race finally has a Jewish candidate, but he’s not getting much organized Jewish support Anthony Weiner’s much hyped announcement that he would run in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor was greeted with a collective shrug by Jewish activists and donors across New York City. That’s in part because the…
Stanley Goldstein sits at the center of a narrow hat store in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, fielding customers’ questions about brim sizes, crowns and colors. Bencraft Hatters, which was first opened in 1948 by Goldstein’s father, has been selling hats to Jews and non-Jews for 65 years and carries everything from cowboy hats and…
Guanabacoa, a colonial town southeast of Havana where the first African guild was created to alleviate the plight of slaves in Cuba, is a somewhat improbable home for not one, but two Jewish cemeteries, both of them more than a century old. They are not the only places where Jews are buried on the island,…
The mayor of Budapest ordered a re-examination of a controversial decision to name a street after an anti-Semitic author. Maria Szucs Ciuc, a spokeswoman for Mayor Istvan Tarlos, told the news site FN24.hu on Thursday that the mayor had ordered a re-examination of the city council’s decision to name a street after Cecile Tormay, a…
During the launch of New York City’s shared bicycle program this week, shiny kiosks throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn have been surrounded by curious gawkers examining the bulky blue bikes that can be rented and returned at multiple locations with at least one notable exception — the Hasidic-dominated neighborhood of South Williamsburg. As Brooklyn has been…
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