Soviet kids had it bad upon immigration. My fellow Soviet refugees and good friends were sent by their well-intentioned parents to a yeshiva, only to be circumcised at the tender age of 12 (Soviet Jews didn’t circumcise their kids because of military hazing). Welcome to the 12 tribes of Israel, boys. Their parents handed them…
This is the second spring that two robins became parents in a tight little nest woven on the lintel above our front door. Last year, when the nest came down, all that was left were shards of baby-blue eggs. I stood for a long time, wondering if it is sacrilegious to throw out the remains,…
Could a lengthy document, written in Latin and published after extensive theological debates, overturn centuries of animosity between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people? Closing the book on almost 2,000 years of persecution seemed nearly impossible when the Second Vatican Council adopted Nostra Aetate, the Catholic Church’s historic rejection of the notion that Jewish…
A half-century ago this year, the Catholic Church issued a landmark document that decried anti-Semitism and asserted that Jews could not be blamed for killing Jesus. The effect: Long-fraught relations between Catholics and Jews were dramatically improved. (JTA) To mark 50 years since the detente, New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan came to the Jewish Theological…
I made my first visit to Ireland more than 30 years ago. When I had married John a few months earlier, I had also wed his Celtic heritage, and was no longer a Goldberg, in name at least. My “Jewishness” became something that it was detected by no one but me. We went to a…
At the border of the town where I grew up there is a circle that straddles Maryland and the District of Columbia and is ringed by a band of churches. Catholic, Protestant, Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist. All are represented here, I remember being told many times. Many of the girls in my town wore the Catholic…
Cardinal Edward Egan, who served as the archbishop of New York from 2000 to 2009, has died at age 82. Egan died Thursday in Manhattan of cardiac arrest, according to a statement by the Archdiocese of New York. Egan’s position as the archbishop of New York placed him, de facto, in one of the country’s…
A new Italian film that attempts to defend wartime Pope Pius XII against accusations he turned a blind eye to the Holocaust has been panned by the Vatican as well as Catholic and Jewish media. “Shades of Truth” is the account of a fictional present-day American journalist who starts off as a critic of Pius…
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