In my decades as a congregational rabbi, I always knew it was time to order our challot for the season the moment I started drafting my five High Holiday sermons. I knew that there would be no time to bake one, much less several, though I did manage to prepare our family version of seasonal…
(JTA) — Lithuania’s state historical institute on the Soviet domination of the country defended in court a deceased collaborator with Nazi Germany who is accused of murdering Jews. The Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of the Residents of Lithuania defended Jonas Noreika against the allegations by numerous historians last month in…
To most people, Yiddish and German are closely related. The languages share many root words and grammatical structures, and most speakers of one language can at least understand an individual speaking the other. To early German Christian scholars, like to many laypersons today, Yiddish was seen as a corrupted and lesser form of German. But…
In my previous article, I wrote about the mysterious Jews of Italy, who seem to be neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardi. So it was natural to turn to a neighboring West European country, France, where the history of the Jewish communities is also quite non-linear. These communities pose a similar difficulty to the simplistic and popular…
One often hears about two main cultural groups of Jews: Ashkenazim and Sephardim. Some also speak of a third group, Mizrahim, for the Jews who lived in modern Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Georgia and Uzbekistan. But these groupings can be more complicated than they at first seem. There are three main ways of approaching the…
After attending the New Waves Day 2018 concert in Dusseldorf, Germany last month, I took a train to Köln, or what we know as Cologne. It was the nearest big city, and I wanted to see if the waterfront along the Rhine was as spectacular as Dusseldorf’s. But what I saw there was even grander….
Manhattan’s legendary garment industry was the “welcome mat” for Jewish immigrants to the city for nearly fifty years. The jobs they found there, such as cutter, sewer and trimmings supplier, helped propel New York’s Jews into the middle class in the late 19th and early 20th century. In 2018, Manhattan’s garment industry is at risk…
I have an aunt named Malkah who I may never know, because she was kidnapped from a Jerusalem hospital in 1961. I didn’t even know that Malkah existed until two years ago when my grandmother, Aisha Biton, passed away, and a chapter of her life, hidden for most of mine, came into the open. Aisha…
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