JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
“I used to think I knew Michael Oren. This is no one I know, or wish to know.” This January 24 tweet by Tamara Cofman Wittes, a Middle East scholar from the Brookings Institution and a former Obama administration official, may have summed up what many in Washington feel now about the former Israeli ambassador…
The international Jewish outreach group Kulanu is trumpeting their 2017 accomplishments, including organizing more than 150 Jewish conversions in Africa and Latin America. “This year, Kulanu teams traveled to Nicaragua in July and Côte d’Ivoire in December to help people who had been preparing for years to convert to Judaism,” the New York-based group wrote…
More than 100 men and women converted to Judaism in Madagascar this month, a historic first for the large island nation off the southeast coast of Africa. The May conversions, organized by Kulanu, a volunteer-run American nonprofit founded in the 1990s to support “isolated and emerging Jewish communities” worldwide, was the product of years of…
For centuries, world travelers dreamed of finding distant Jewish tribes in the faraway corners of their known world — over the mountains, in remote villages, practicing customs preserved in isolation. Today, a quick Google search will do. In Facebook groups and on Skype, on Whatsapp and Instagram, communities from Africa, Asia and the Americas gather…
With two months to go before Israelis go to the polls, the Labor Party opened a statistically significant lead over Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud for the first time since its mid-December alliance with Tzipi Livni’s Hatnuah. Of six polls released last Thursday and Friday, January 15 and 16, one — also the largest poll, with 830…
Yair Lapid (Getty Images); Moshe Kahlon (Facebook When Yair Lapid skyrocketed to the top of Israeli politics during the last election campaign in 2013, he did it by positioning himself as the most “hevrati” (socio-economically conscious) candidate. He and his party, Yesh Atid, capitalized on the momentum of the “tent protests” that brought half a…
(JTA) — On Fridays at sundown, the Jewish residents of this village set amid the lush hills of eastern Uganda gather in the synagogue to greet Shabbat. The room is bare, the light is dim and the Conservative prayer books are worn. But the spare surroundings do little to diminish the enthusiasm of the men,…
