Henry Okololica survived the Holocaust, attended the March on Washington and led a Connecticut synagogue for four decades. He died at 103 on September 25. “God took care of me,” he once told the Connecticut Jewish Ledger in an interview, referring to the Holocaust. “I didn’t escape Germany to live my own life. I escaped…
(JTA) — Swastikas and graffiti, some of it anti-Semitic, was painted on the wall of a public high school in Stamford, Connecticut. The vandalism discovered Saturday morning at the Academy of Information Technology and Engineering was the second act of anti-Semitic vandalism to occur this summer in Stamford. In July, a city resident used feces…
(JTA) — A Connecticut judge entered pleas of not guilty on behalf of a prominent Connecticut rabbi charged in the alleged sexual assault of a minor. Rabbi Daniel Greer, 77, the founding rabbi of the Yeshiva of New Haven, appeared Tuesday in Superior Court in that city. He is charged with second-degree sexual assault and risk…
Definition of “birthright” (courtesy Merriam-Webster dictionary): a right that you have because you were born into a particular position, family, place, etc. Well, okay, I was born into a Jewish family and I, therefore, consider noshing on chopped liver — be it sandwich, appetizer or full-scale platter — to be my birthright. So it seemed…
(JTA) — Some 60 headstones were toppled in a Jewish cemetery in Hartford, Conn. The damage at the Ateres Knesseth Israel Cemetery was discovered on Friday, when a relative of someone buried there visited the gravesite. The woman who made the discovery told police that when she visited the cemetery on Monday, five days earlier,…
(JTA) — A Connecticut yeshiva whose founding rabbi was ordered to pay $20 million to a former student who claimed he was raped by the rabbi is operating without proper certification, the state said. The school came under additional scrutiny from state regulatory agencies last month after a federal jury ordered Rabbi Daniel Greer and the…
A prominent New Haven, Conn. rabbi facing a civil lawsuit in federal court has refused under questioning to say whether he forced his accuser to have sex with him. “Did you force Eli Mirlis to have sex with you when he was a child?” Mirlis’s attorney asked Rabbi Daniel Greer at a May 11 hearing,…
(JTA) — A swastika, and racist and anti-Semitic graffiti, was found on the campus of a high school in a wealthy Connecticut suburb. In an emailed letter to parents and students of Ridgefield High School, Principal Stacey Gross said such acts are a blow to the school’s striving to be inclusive. “I know that you…
