Just before sunset on July 2, 1999, a Ford Crown Vic approached 15-year-old Ephraim Wolfe in Chicago’s West Rogers Park. A bullet had just torn a dime-sized hole in Wolfe’s leg, a couple of inches below the knee. The friend with whom he’d been walking had run to a nearby house for help, and Wolfe…
The Jewish community in Chicago is one of the biggest in the country, and until recently, the mayor was Jewish, but leaders in the city’s largest Orthodox neighborhood said that a mayor hadn’t come to meet them there for decades – until June 15, that is. Lori Lightfoot, who took office last month, is the…
In April Chicago elected a new mayor: Lori Lightfoot, the first black woman to lead the third-largest city in the country. In several appearances, most notably at her victory party and her recent swearing-in, she was joined by her wife, Amy Eshleman. So who is Amy? Eshleman and Lightfoot have been together for 16 years,…
(JTA) — The smashing of two car windows outside a Chicago synagogue was not a hate crime, according to local police. A suspect has been arrested in the vandalism this week in West Rogers Park, a neighborhood with a large Jewish population. It was among 14 similar incidents in the neighborhood that took place over…
One half of the Christian couple who dressed and acted like Orthodox Jews and tried to convert their neighbors wrote a Facebook post this week defending their actions and lambasting the “fake stories” that have brought “shame to Judaism.” Rivkah Joy Weber, who went by the name Rivkah Costello while living in the heavily-Jewish Chicago…
(JTA) — An unknown arsonist attempted twice to set on fire a synagogue building in downtown Chicago, while vandals smashed the windows of cars parked outside of a synagogue on the far north side of the city. Chicago Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi told reporters on Sunday that Chicago Police Deputy Superintendent Anthony Ricci ordered that…
Updated 4:00 p.m. A couple that had moved to a heavily-Jewish neighborhood in Chicago were actually Christian missionaries who had been trying to pass as Jewish in order to promote their religion, the Jewish news website COLlive reported. The proselytizers, who went by David and Rivkah Costello, were exposed by a visitor from Brooklyn, New…
(JTA) — Louis Farrakhan punctuated a speech at a Chicago church Thursday with denials that he was anti-Semitic and an assertion that he was “here to separate the good Jews from the satanic Jews.” The longtime leader of the Chicago-based Nation of Islam spoke at the St. Sabina Catholic Church at the invitation of the Rev….
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