My story about the crushing pressures ultra-Orthodox women face to raise large families touched a raw nerve. The story went live on the Forward’s web site on Monday, March 11. By that night, I was sorting through an avalanche of emails from people within and out of the community, from those who sympathized, and those…
A Palestinian shot by Israeli soldiers during a confrontation with stone-throwers in the occupied West Bank two weeks ago died of his wounds on Thursday, his family and a hospital official said. The incident occurred during protests in support of a hunger strike by four Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. Mohammed Asfour, 22, was shot…
Palestinian children detained by the Israeli military are subject to widespread, systematic ill-treatment that violates international law, a UNICEF report said on Wednesday. The United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) estimated that 700 Palestinian children aged 12 to 17, most of them boys, are arrested, interrogated and detained by the Israeli military, police and security agents…
A Bronx synagogue suffered a terrible blow this week: the theft of three sifrey-Torah, or Torah scrolls, each one worth $45,000. The theft at the Orthodox shul, Young Israel of Mosholu Parkway, on East 208th Street in the Norwood Heights section, was discovered by a worker last Sunday. Besides the Torah scrolls, the thief also…
The first thing I thought when I learned that gender reveal parties exist was, “Oh, Jews do NOT do that.” My reaction was based on the fact that every pregnant Jewish woman I have ever known has delayed announcing her pregnancy until she’s past her first trimester (at the very least). In the Jewish community,…
I just explained the Holocaust to my daughter through the lens of food scarcity and kashrut. I hadn’t planned to explain the Holocaust to my daughter at age 4. However, after listening to Leah Johnson’s (Yonson) story of Holocaust survival in the Forests of Belarus (with the Bielski Brothers – see Daniel Craig in the…
The synagogue nearest to my new house is the second-oldest in Los Angeles. Recessed from the street in the largely Hispanic neighborhood of Highland Park, it’s so small that it nearly looks like a house — albeit one with lovely stained glass windows. The Rabbi, who used to be a dancer, seems to have brought…
One hundred and fifty: a number simultaneously enormous and tiny. One hundred and fifty Czech Jewish teenagers left behind everything and everyone — the lives they’d known, their parents, their siblings, their grandparents and aunts and uncles. One hundred and fifty Czech teens, selected by the Jewish Agency’s Youth Aliyah and the Denmark branch of…
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