One day in May 1935, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin welcomed French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval to Moscow to discuss the rising Nazi threat and France’s defensive plans. How many troops mobilized? Armored divisions? Artillery? At one point, historians say, Laval asked Stalin to ease his harsh treatment of Russian Catholics in order to ensure the…
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu just gave the finger to a huge chunk of American Jews and, by doing so, dangerously upset the already precarious relationship between the Israeli government and the Diaspora. There is no other way to interpret the Israeli Cabinet’s spineless decision yesterday to accede to the ultra-Orthodox members of the coalition…
If Israel allows President Donald Trump to visit the Western Wall on his upcoming visit, it would constitute a horrible desecration of a holy site. This spiritually vapid man would use the visit as another chance to wrap himself in false sanctimony; Israel cannot let this happen. This would be true even if Trump had…
For those of us in Jerusalem who are not religious, there’s a certain unwritten legal code that is passed around among the secular. After a few weeks, the art of being appropriate (rather, appropriate enough) becomes second nature: try not to bump into charedi men on the bus. Don’t walk through religious neighborhoods while using…
Hundreds of women joined Women of the Wall for the group’s monthly Rosh Chodesh service, which included a Torah scroll smuggled in to the women’s section of the Western Wall. Among the some 300 women who assembled for the service on Thursday morning to mark the new Hebrew month of Iyar were those from nine…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israel’s Supreme Court called on the Israeli government to respond to lawsuits regarding the establishment of an egalitarian prayer space at the Western Wall. The court on Friday set a deadline of June 4 for the government to respond to the lawsuits and resolve the crisis, Haaretz reported. The court combined three…
The Western Wall got a makeover this week when a cleaning crew removed thousands of tiny prayer notes from the cracks between the stones ahead of the Passover holiday. The cleaning occurs twice of year, after which the notes are gathered into sacks and buried on the Mount of Olives cemetery, an ancient Jewish burial…
Jewish law states that a court may not hear one side of an argument without the other party being present. If anyone should want to judge anything, they must listen to both sides of the argument, and only then can they find the truth. Many have written that the Charedi community ought to be ashamed…
