Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes claims to have arrested an unprecedented 89 men on child sex-abuse charges in the ultra-Orthodox communities in Brooklyn over the past two years — but declines to provide any details backing up the numbers or to give the status of any of the cases. Sexual abuse survivors and their advocates…
The abduction and murder of Leiby Kletzky in a heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn has reignited a debate over when Jews can report sexual abuse to the authorities. Levi Aron, 35, was indicted on murder charges in the July 12 killing and dismemberment of 8-year-old Leiby. In a confession to police, Aron said he…
Performance and installation artist Helène Aylon scrutinizes the entrenched, sometimes invisible, belief systems that shape society. Since the 1970s, she has used her work as a tool for poetic dissent and constructive revisionism. Aylon’s early work contributed to the women’s movement, opposing the unrealistic imagery pedaled by magazines like Playboy. In the 1980s, her focus…
Tongues have been clicking in the Orthodox world about the U.S. debut of Eve Annenberg’s feature film “Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish” (which I previously wrote about for the Forward here), but the New York Jewish Film Festival screening on January 16 at Lincoln Center sold out quickly and the Hasidic dropouts-turned actors who star…
Noah built an ark. Rabbi Shaul Shimon Deutsch built a Borough Park taxidermy museum in a brownstone and filled it, he claims, with every animal mentioned in the Torah — 350 specimens in all. An article in The Brooklyn Ink details Torah Animal World, which will be complete once Deutsch puts the finishing touches on…
I was pleased to see a profile in the New York Times on July 20 of the unusual cantorial-music-aficionado-turned-audiophile-sound-engineer Mendel Werdyger. Werdyger is the proprietor of Mostly Music, one of the last bastions of old school Jewish culture in New York City. While you can certainly buy the standard schlock recordings of Hasidic boys choirs…
Pacino talking in a husky smokers accent, Pacino accepting an Oscar… Pacino shuckling in the back of a Hasidic shul in Brooklyn? Definitely, not something you’d expect. But the actor was spotted in Brooklyn Hasidic Borough Park neighborhood davening and eating cheesecake early last week, according to a post on the Wall Street Journal’s blog….
Five torahs valued at up to $50,000 a piece were stolen from a synagogue in Brooklyn yesterday morning, saddening congregants and the area’s Jewish community. Police said the burglar may have entered the Karlsburg Synagogue (also known as the Khal Yirei Hashem Synagogue) in the Borough Park neighborhood through either an open or unlocked window….
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