JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
What can we do to help Israel’s fragile new government survive? During three intense days this month, as part of a leadership delegation sponsored by Masorti (Conservative) Judaism, I met with a full panoply of Israeli leaders from across the political spectrum, inside the new government and in the opposition. The new government knows that…
Over the past seven weeks, the British Jewish community raised £200,000 ($260,000) for the resettlement of 100 unaccompanied children from the Calais refugee camp here in the UK. The campaign was initiated by a group of leaders from Masorti (Conservative) communities in and around London, who came together in the early summer to try and…
An Israeli Masorti Jew may be the one who goes to synagogue on Shabbat morning and then takes off his kippah and drives to watch his favorite team’s soccer game in the afternoon; or the teenager who will never forget to kiss the mezuzah mounted on every doorpost, even on the way out to a…
The Chief Rabbinate has issued a warning that wine produced by the first Israeli winery to be supervised by the Masorti Movement, as the Conservative Movement is called in Israel, is not kosher. “The Conservative Movement is forbidden by law to authorize kashrut,” the Rabbinate wrote on the page devoted to kashrut updates on its…
For the first time in the history of the Masorti movement, its rabbis performed conversions to Judaism in Portugal. The two conversions were performed in the Portuguese capital at a beit din, or rabbinical court, of three judges, who on April 26 recognized Juliana Fernandes da Silva and her life partner, Edgard Pimentel, as Jews….
I am the son of a Yekke. My father was born in Germany. His parents escaped to Palestine in the nick of time, just before World War II broke out. Both were doctors, but they came with no Hebrew and there was no work for them. It was tough. They may have left Germany behind…
Noa Raz wasn’t totally surprised when, on May 11, a Haredi man stared at the marks on her arm at Be’er Sheva’s central bus station. The 30-year-old Israeli woman prays each morning wearing a tallit and tefillin and the latter sometimes leaves imprints on her pale forearms. As she waited to board a bus to…
Before leaving for Israel, where she will take part in the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations’ annual mission to the Jewish state, Rabbi Julie Schonfeld reflects on the recent debacle over women’s prayer at the Western Wall — responding both as the Rabbinical Assembly’s executive vice president and as the mother of two…
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