Early last Saturday morning—the Jewish Sabbath—someone smashed the windows of the Chicago Loop Synagogue and drew swastikas on the front of the building. Lee Zoldan, the synagogue’s president, got a phone call with the bad news at 1 a.m. An hour later, she found herself standing with her husband in the middle of Clark Street…
CHICAGO (JUF News via JTA) — Some 1,000 Jewish, Muslim and Christian Chicago residents came together in unity at a synagogue that was vandalized with swastikas four days earlier. The Wednesday event at the Chicago Loop Synagogue was sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Jewish United Fund and billed as “an interfaith…
I just read with interest that Hebrew College, in Massachusetts, has introduced “the first-ever graduate school of Jewish Education to establish a specialization in our Master’s Degree program and a standalone graduate certificate in Interfaith Families Jewish Engagement.” IFJE’s director is Keren McGinity, who also — full if not especially scandalous disclosure — edited an…
At 1:30 p.m. on the day of the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., I huddled with my group of students from the University of Pennsylvania alongside thousands upon thousands of other protesters. Our group tried to find a route around the gridlock, to no avail, when a Muslim freshman realized that the time for afternoon…
If a picture is worth a thousand words, the photograph of Muslims and Jews gathered around an unfurled Torah in the sanctuary of Temple Shalom Emeth, Rabbi Susan Abramson’s suburban Boston congregation, says volumes about her ongoing and notable interfaith outreach. The picture above was taken during an “Evening of Fellowship” with the local Muslim…
In 2010, Sheryl Olitzky, a marketing professional, who had worked in marketing throughout her career, decided to start an interfaith dialogue group for Jewish and Muslim women. She sought advice from various people who had experience with putting together these types of groups. One of them, Eboo Patel of the Interfaith Youth Core, told her…
When Rabbi Seymour Rosenbloom, a retired rabbi from Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, performed an intermarriage ceremony for his stepdaughter and her fiancé in 2014 more than a glass got shattered at the end of the wedding ceremony. Rabbi Rosenbloom’s membership in the Rabbinical Assembly wound up in pieces as well. In December 2016, the rabbinical body…
In a moving essay for Catapult, Amy Beth Wright describes how her marriage to a non-Jewish man led some of her relatives to cut her out of their lives: “In the past three years, despite being excluded from family weddings, Seders, Rosh Hashanah meals, and Shabbat dinners, I have reached out to my aunt, uncle,…
