I’m not used to sitting during services, but this day was different. It was my daughter’s bat mitzvah and for one Shabbat I wasn’t the rabbi, I was the dad. I’ve been officiating at b’nei mitzvah ceremonies since the beginning of the pandemic. What started out as Zoom ceremonies has transitioned to outdoor, socially-distant, masked…
The latest guilty plea in the Chabad of Poway financial scandal has connected an additional religious leader to the scheme that rocked a community victimized by a 2019 terrorist attack. Rotem Cooper, 54, admitted Tuesday to defrauding the government and his employer by claiming thousands of dollars in false donations, becoming the eighth person to…
For a long while there, California had two Jewish United States senators at the same time, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein. Boxer retired after four terms in 2017; Feinstein remains, as the oldest senator at 87. Now that Boxer’s successor, Kamala Harris, is about to become the next Vice President, California is getting her replacement:…
Not long after the Boy Scouts of America started letting girls in, Gabbi Stein felt her parents nudging her to join. Their sales pitch was hardly original: Their daughter was a junior in high school. It would look good on her college applications. “At first I was like, Oh my God, this is totally not…
Read this article in Yiddish. Yakob Basner may be 93 years-old, but that doesn’t stop him from doing a job he loves: teaching Yiddish. Since immigrating to Southern California from the former Soviet Union in 1980, Basner has taught the mame-loshn to over 2,000 people. “If you want to understand the history of the Jewish…
Yavneh Hebrew Academy, an Orthodox day school that sued the state of California in August for permission to reopen, has become the latest to shut down after confirming a number of Covid-19 cases on its campus. Yavneh had been one of several Orthodox schools in the area operating as a camp during county-mandated school closures,…
A lawsuit against the state of California filed by Jewish schools in the Los Angeles area has expanded their legal footing for in-person activities, enabling them to bring more students to campus even as coronavirus cases surge. But the schools have not escaped the record-setting spike in California that has continued apace into December, and…
The coronavirus pandemic, which has shut down or slowed down so many aspects of Jewish life, may have sped up another: synagogue mergers. In one of the biggest consolidations of recent years, University Synagogue, a Reform congregation with declining membership in the West Los Angeles neighborhood of Brentwood, struck a deal this month with Wilshire…
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