This is the Forward’s coverage of Brooklyn, a borough of New York City home to a major population of Hasidic Jews.
Brooklyn
The Latest
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News My Brighton Beach
Russians don’t speak highly of Brighton Beach, the enclave in Southern Brooklyn where I spent many of my formative years. The neighborhood’s critics disparage it with a degree of shame or superiority, or even irony, as was the case in my family. Moscow-born author Lara Vapnyar encapsulated this widespread sentiment when she titled her contribution…
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News Telling Story of Holocaust’s Horrors Through Ultra-Orthodox Eyes
Is it permissible to show images of Jewish women with their heads shaved but without a head covering as they walk towards Nazi gas chambers? This is the type of question faced by organizers of the first Holocaust museum to be aimed specifically at Orthodox Jews. Elly Kleinman, the Orthodox businessman behind the project, sought…
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Opinion Can Brooklyn Jews Talk Civilly About Israel?
Young Jews discuss Israel at a ‘Resetting the Table’ event in Brooklyn. / Ezra Weinberg This past Sunday, in the high-beamed, chilly Brooklyn Lyceum, a group of 20- and 30-somethings tried to talk about Israel — no small feat. The program, called “Resetting the Table,” was designed to allow young people to get together and…
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News Kosher Soup Kitchen Struggles With Rising Ranks of Hungry as Passover Nears
On a recent chilly afternoon in Queens, two women shivered in a line of about 50 people that trailed out the door of Masbia, a kosher food pantry and soup kitchen. The first woman, from Manhattan, wore baggy pants. The other, from Queens, was clad in a long, draping skirt. Their outfits signaled differences in…
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News Orthodox Singers Find Creative Voice by Performing for Other Women Only
Talia Lakritz, 20, a Modern Orthodox Jewish sophomore at Barnard College, and her two girlfriends got off a very crowded No. 3 train at Kingston Avenue in a fevered hurry of glee, as they headed to an open-mic night for women at the gallery at The Creative Soul, an organization in the Crown Heights section…
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Fast Forward Brooklyn’s Congregation Beth Elohim Lays Off 12 Amid Fiscal Crisis
Newly discovered accounting errors at Brooklyn’s Congregation Beth Elohim forced the synagogue to lay off 12 employees in mid-March, synagogue officials say. The prominent Reform synagogue’s rabbi, Andy Bachman, also announced in March that he would not renew his contract after it expires next year. The synagogue’s president said that Bachman’s departure was unrelated to…
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News His Hasidic Toy Story
Samuel Lipschitz, 27, grinned as a pint-sized red smart car pulled up next to the curb outside his toy store on Lee Avenue in Brooklyn. Lacquered onto the side of the car was a children’s cartoon character: a freckled, round-faced boy with curly brown peyes, or sidelocks, and a yarmulke. “What Walt Disney did to…
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News Rabbi Performs Controversial Metzitzah B’Peh Circumcision Rite — Law or No
After cutting off the infant’s foreskin, Rabbi Avrohom Cohn leaned down toward the baby boy who was cradled on a white pillow atop his grandfather’s knee. Standing fully over the child, with his back to the dozens of immaculately dressed guests at the Syrian Jewish gathering in Brooklyn, it was impossible to see what Cohn…
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