This is the Forward’s coverage of Hasidic Judaism, a sub-group of Haredi Judaism that adheres to the historical traditions of Eastern European Jews, including communicating in Yiddish.
Hasidic
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Opinion When Reb Zalman Hummed ‘Home on the Range’
I first met Zalman Schachter (not yet-Shalomi) in 1971 in Warwick, N.Y., at Kutz, a Reform Jewish camp where my wife, Elana, and I spent our first married summer as teachers and counselors. Our friend, newly ordained rabbi, Larry Kushner, had hired me along with a few other rabbinical students to work with him and…
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News Hasidic in the Heat
Aren’t you shvitzing in that? To those of us who recently made the gleeful switch to shorts and tees from pants and sweaters, the garb of some Orthodox and pretty much all Hasidic Jews can look painfully off-season. Long coats, long sleeves, long skirts, long stockings, long side curls — well, those probably aren’t a…
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News Doomed N.Y. Firefighter Saved 7-Year-Old Hasidic Boy’s Life After Garage Mishap
A New York City firefighter killed in a weekend blaze earned accolades in the Satmar Hasidic community for saving a 7-year-old boy’s life just weeks before his tragic death in a Brooklyn public housing high-rise. Lt. Gordon “Matt” Ambelas was among the firefighters who rescued Mendy Gotlieb after the Satmar boy’s head and arm were…
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News My Time at Satmar Summer Camp
Recently my 9-year-old son came home from school demanding I sign him up for sleep-away camp, which, he insisted, his best friend is attending for the entire summer. I nearly fell off the chair imagining my kid, who often forgets to remove his pajamas before he puts on his shorts on summer mornings, fending for…
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Life When Reb Zalman Met the Dalai Lama
The Dalai Lama speaks during a visit to Germany. / Getty Images It was, and will always remain, one of the most mysteriously significant experiences of my life. In 1990, eight of us travelled to Dharmsala, India at the invitation of his Holiness the Dalai Lama under the auspices of the Nathan Cummings Foundation. The…
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News Reb Zalman Married Counter Culture to Hasidic Judaism
Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, one of the important Jewish innovators in postwar America, inspiration to a generation and ecumenical spiritualist, died on July 3 aged 89. A tireless organizer and spiritual architect, Schachter-Shalomi single-handedly created a new form of Jewish practice and spirituality known as Jewish Renewal, founded on the idea of Gaia consciousness: the notion…
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News Reb Zalman, the Prophet of Both-And
I last spent time with Reb Zalman a month ago, during Shavuot at the Isabella Freedman Retreat Center. He looked and felt like all of his 89 years — and he told us as much. As in “The December Project,” his collaboration with Sara Davidson on the late years of life, Reb Zalman was entirely…
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Life When SCOTUS and Hasidic Courts Look Same
Adam Jones / Global Photo Archive On Monday, the Supreme Court took the position of so many dayanim (a judge in a religious court, but in the Hasidic world, also a man who rules authoritatively on everyday halachic questions) and rabbis across the world in symbolically declining women reproductive autonomy. (I use the word “symbolically”…
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