Two collapsed ceilings led to one big mitzvah for a Brooklyn synagogue and a neighboring church. After its roof collapsed in 2009, Congregation Beth Elohim, located in Park Slope, temporarily moved its services to the Old First Reformed Church, down the block. Two years later, Rabbi Andy Bachman was nearly struck by chunks of plaster…
With the number of African migrants living in Israel currently around 60,000, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently instructed the Defense Ministry to erect tent cities to hold African migrants. Formulated in the past as a contingency plan for an Israeli civilian population fleeing population centers during wartime, the original plan called for setting up temporary…
Each Friday, a beat-up truck comes trundling down our Jerusalem block to collect used household items. “Alte zakhn! Alte zakhn!” the loudspeaker rings out. Then comes a list of items of interest: couches, chairs, tables, beds. All these are announced in Hebrew. Only that initial call, “Alte zakhn!” — literally, “old things” — is in…
Ask Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center how he grades Twitter’s efforts to combat anti-Semitic hate speech, and Cooper, the group’s associate dean, won’t even give Twitter an F. “They haven’t even shown up to the dance yet,” said Cooper, who directs the center’s anti-hate speech efforts. Facebook, on the other hand, has recently…
Forty years ago, Gail Parent wrote a groundbreaking novel on what was at the time a fairly unexplored topic: the unmarried career woman. The book, “Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York,” completed over a period of a year and a half while Parent was simultaneously writing for “The Carol Burnett Show,” is…
At about 1 a.m. on the second night of Passover, Alexander “Aron” Goncharov stepped from Brodsky Synagogue, in the center of Kiev, into the cold night air. The 25-year-old yeshiva student, who was staying at the synagogue’s hostel, never returned to his room. After hours of frantic phone calls the following day, yeshiva authorities finally…
Sitting in a circle, the group of nine men and women giggled nervously as they discussed things not to say or do on a first date. To an outsider, their suggestions might seem obvious. “Don’t talk about your last boyfriend or girlfriend,” one plump woman ventured with a giggle. “Don’t tell them what you don’t…
“Because I inaugurated the spring luncheon more than a decade ago, I have a proprietary feeling about this event,” said public relations specialist Rochel Berman, keynote speaker at the Annual Spring Luncheon of The American Society for Yad Vashem, held at the Marriott Marquis on May 16. “I’d like to speak about Eli Zborowski, president…
It’s not too late to save Michael Fromowitz. Fromowitz, 18, and a pack of his yeshiva classmates had come to the ultra-Orthodox anti-Internet rally at Citi Field in Queens from the Hasidic enclave of New Square in upstate New York. A redhead with long side curls, Fromowitz doesn’t have his own email address. He does…
In this week’s podcast, host Josh Nathan-Kazis talks with J.J. Goldberg about recent violent protest in Tel Aviv that have targeted African immigrants. Then, Forward fellow Naomi Zeveloff joins the conversation to discuss new guidelines being issued by the Conservative movement on how to perform same-sex marriages. Later, opinion editor Gal Beckerman discusses his recent…
When Gerald Skolnik, the president of a group of 1,600 Conservative rabbis, was asked to officiate at a gay wedding last year, he didn’t know where to start. “I was flying by the seat of my pants,” he said. Should the wedding look like a heterosexual ceremony, or something else entirely? Now he has guidelines…
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