Israelis who plan to marry but don’t want their weddings performed by a government-approved Orthodox rabbi have an alternative: They can leave the country. “Ironically, this is the only democratic country in the world in which a Conservative rabbi cannot officiate a marriage according to the law,” Rabbi Levi Weiman-Kelman, head of Jerusalem’s progressive synagogue…
Although visitors to Israel’s big cities see what appears to be a prosperous lifestyle, 40% of Israel’s children live below the poverty level, according to the Jewish Agency for Israel. Many of these underprivileged children live in the Negev region, where opportunities for a proper English education are sparse. While native English-speaking language teachers flock…
When a new venture at Columbia University brought together 30 Muslim and Jewish entrepreneurs from the United States, the United Kingdom and France for a cross-cultural dialogue, the focus was on something other than interfaith work. They talked business. Then, somewhere amid the conversations about best business practices and social entrepreneurship, the difficult issues of…
For many Jewish children, the idea of charity often means dropping change into a bright-blue tzedakah box. Sure, the collected money goes to charitable organizations, but how do you measure whether the kids’ own efforts have any noticeable effect? Now, one group of students is getting the opportunity to see its money at work. During…
Ask Rabbi Marcia Prager what a typical day at the Davennen’ Leadership Training Institute is like, and she won’t talk about the master classes, the skills sessions, the group work. Not at first. At first, she’ll start at the beginning. “We wake up as the sun is getting up, molding our lives within the prayerful…
Tova Rosenberg knows about stories. Sitting in her Yeshiva University office in New York City’s Washington Heights, the creator of the Holocaust education project “Names, Not Numbers” recounted a student’s interview with the son of a Holocaust survivor. The son recalled asking his father, “Why do you survivors have all these stories?” And the father…
The Jewish blogosphere is abuzz with reports that Madonna has plans to take her children, Lourdes (12) and Rocco (9) to Auschwitz, when the singer visits Poland as part of an upcoming tour. According to a report initially published in the British Daily Mirror, but circulated widely in the Jewish community by Ynetnews, a source…
Noted historian and education expert Diane Ravitch is weighing in on New York City’s planned Hebrew language charter school. And, unsurprisingly, this champion of civic education and e pluribus unum — and ardent opponent of multiculturalist cant and other centrifugal forces — is not pleased by this latest effort to enlist the public schools in…
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