JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Two Arab-Israeli plumbers shocked a 95-year-old Holocaust survivor when their hard work on a major leak added up to an unexpected total of zero. Brothers Simon and Salim Matari made a house call to Haifa resident Rosa Meir, the Times of Israel reported. WHen the plumber brothers learned that she was a survivor, they refused…
“Homeless women need bras.” Those four words were life-changing for Dana Marlowe when she first heard them in 2015. Known as “The Accidental Bra Fairy,” Marlowe has distributed more than 500,000 bras and 2.5 million personal hygiene products to women in need. During last month’s government shutdown, Marlowe put out a Facebook post in which…
While law enforcement agents were searching the Brooklyn home of Akayed Ullah, the would-be suicide attacker who had detonated a pipe bomb in a Manhattan subway on Monday, a Chabad husband and wife took the unusual opportunity to launch a “mitzvah campaign” in the neighborhood. Rabbi Yisrolik Langsam, who heads a Chabad outpost in the…
It is a sight familiar to anyone who takes public transit between Brooklyn and Manhattan in the early fall: a seasonal crush of ultra-Orthodox Jews flooding the city in order to bring the world one step closer to Messianic redemption. On street corners, on campus, on subway platforms and towing a sukkah on the back…
(JTA) — Natan Zaidenweber thought the mohel was kidding. His wife, Linda Raab, thought it was some kind of religious formality and didn’t give it a second thought. But the mohel, Cantor Philip Sherman, was serious. Though most fathers demur when he invites them to perform the bris on their sons by clipping their foreskin, preferring…
As we wove through the backroads of an 18th-century Italian estate in our rented Volvo, I questioned myself once more: What exactly was I doing there? It was the summer of 2004, my first time in Europe. And in truth, the Baroque home commissioned by one of the Doges of Venice and the site of…
Whether it was implicitly or explicitly taught to me, I don’t remember, but somehow, I always knew: The people who hold the Torahs during the reading of the Kol Nidre prayer are the congregation’s big machers. A few years ago, as I stood at Kol Nidre, my eyes swept over the bimah. Even I, a…
A new basketball court built as part of a bar mitzvah project by a New York boy was dedicated in Beersheba. The court was dedicated Sunday in the “Yud Alef” neighborhood of Beersheba, a neighborhood that is mainly home to immigrants from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union. As part of the opening of the…
