SURFSIDE, Fla. (JTA) — One kind of disaster, volunteer medic Baruch Sandhaus said, has a “lot of patients” — a harrowing scene with many people and their injuries to treat. The sudden collapse of one of the residential Champlain Towers buildings this week in Surfside, Florida, a town in Miami-Dade County with a large Jewish…
The wall of remembrance for the missing people in the collapsed condominium tower in Surfside, Florida is on a chain link fence facing the building that fell around them. Pictures of happy couples, smiling families, many with Jewish surnames, seem to float in a wire net woven with roses and other flowers, wilting in the…
(JTA) — Among Rabbi Mayer Berger’s first thoughts on seeing the 12 stories of the Champlain Tower South pancaked upon themselves: This is like Sept. 11. Then as now, destruction of unimaginable proportions claimed many lives without warning, in a manner that rendered traditional practices for burying the Jewish dead impossible to perform. Those practices…
The first known LGBTQ synagogue was formed 51 years ago, when the House of David and Jonathan held services in the upstairs of a Brooklyn church during the fall of 1970. At the time, Rabbi Herbert Katz told the newspaper GAY that most of his fellow clergy denied that there were any gay Jews. And…
(JTA) — When a portion of Champlain Towers crumbled early Thursday morning, thrusting the beach town of Surfside, Florida into tragedy, it also struck at the heart of a thriving and growing Jewish community. As of Friday morning, four people had been confirmed dead, and local authorities say 159 remain missing. Search and rescue teams…
Jacob Solomon has responded to hurricanes, terror attacks and Israeli wars — but nothing prepared him for the Champlain Towers South collapse. The president and chief executive officer of the Greater Miami Jewish Federation was awakened early Thursday morning with news that huge swaths of a condominium just north of Miami Beach had fallen. He…
Sarah Schulman had already been covering AIDS as a journalist for five years when she attended a 1987 demonstration organized by the newly-formed AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, better known as ACT UP. ACT UP members picketed outside New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center for 72 hours in protest of the sluggish pace…
The caucus was created to raise awareness of the challenges facing the Jewish and Black communities
Haviva Ner-David was just starting to promote her debut novel, about the intersecting lives of two Israeli women — one Jewish, one Palestinian — when last month’s military escalation with Gaza erupted, accompanied by the worst internecine fighting between Jewish and Arab citizens in recent memory. Ner David, a rabbi, writer, and mother of seven,…
A Reconstructionist congregation that was housed in the Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha building in Pittsburgh targeted in a deadly shooting in 2018 is asking Attorney General Merrick Garland to “abandon its quest for the death penalty” in the case against the accused shooter. In a June 17 letter to Garland, the president of Congregation Dor…
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