It happened when I made my first visit to the former concentration camps of Auschwitz. I had seen the iconic words “Arbeit macht frei” before in photos and movies, as well as at the main entrance gate to Birkenau, and had learned and read about what happened there. Growing up in Germany, I considered myself…
A new effort underway in Denver, backed by a wide-ranging coalition of Jewish organizations, hopes to use modern marketing techniques to increase enrollment at early childhood education centers and, in the process, lure a new generation of young and sometimes leery families back into Jewish life. The goals of the $810,000 initiative, led by the…
Several suspects were arrested in the suspected arson attack on a joint Arab-Jewish school in Jerusalem. The suspects were arrested a week ago, shortly after a fire was set in the classroom of the Max Rayne Hand In Hand Jerusalem School. On Sunday, the Petach Tikvah Magistrate’s Court lifted a media gag order on the…
A lapsed haredi Orthodox Jew is suing the Quebec government for $1.25 million for not enforcing provincial education guidelines that he says left him virtually illiterate and unemployable. Yonanan Lowen, 36, attended two still-operating illegal haredi Tosh yeshivas north of Montreal and spoke only in Yiddish. He says he never learned to read or write…
At least 1,000 Palestinians will receive a free university education in Venezuela. The president of the Republic of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, welcomed 119 Palestinian students who will be trained in the field of medicine through the new Yasser Arafat Scholarship Program, and announced the expansion of the program. “We will train at least 1,000 doctors,…
You would have to have a heart encrusted with cynicism to not be moved by Malala Yousafzai. It is, in many ways, a modern miracle. An activist for equal education for young girls in her native Pakistan, Malala survived a Taliban bullet and expanded her local quest into an international movement for women’s education in…
The Michigan State University students were still jet-lagged from their ten-hour flight when news of rockets striking Sderot reached them in Jerusalem. The next morning, June 29 — just the third day of their summer Jewish Studies program in Israel — the students heard Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proclaim Israel “ready” for what would soon…
Five years ago, Kendall Weistroffer had almost no connection to Judaism. The Colorado native rarely stepped foot in a synagogue, hadn’t celebrated a bat mitzvah and seemed as likely to study Finnish as Hebrew. She eventually met Rabbi Michael Sunshine, director of Jewish Student Connection, a network of Jewish high school discussion groups in Denver,…
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