A dramatic offer to set up a new egalitarian prayer section at the Western Wall in Jerusalem was met with a no less dramatic willingness to compromise on behalf of all the major religious leaders in the American Jewish community. In a rare show of consensus, activists on the liberal side of the Reform movement…
Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky met Thursday with Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz, chairman of the Western Wall Heritage Foundation, to express his shock at a letter sent by police warning that women would be arrested for reciting the Kaddish mourner’s prayer at the Western Wall. “The Kotel must continue to be a symbol of unity for…
Natan Sharansky was elected today to a second four-year term as chairman of the Jewish Agency in a unanimous vote by the organization’s Board of Governors. Deputy Chairman Rany Trainin was also reelected to a second term. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking on Monday to the Board of Governors in Jerusalem, urged its members to…
He brought unprecedented attention to the plight of Soviet Jewry. He stood up to the KGB. He survived nine years in Siberia. He served in Israel’s fractious government. Now, Natan Sharansky is facing his next challenge: finding a solution to the growing battle over women’s prayer restrictions at the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site. In…
Reminiscing on the golden days of Jewish American activism, two heroes of the Soviet Jewry movement took to the stage at the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America in its main plenary session on Monday. Natan Sharansky, the former refusnik who is now head of the Jewish Agency for Israel and Nobel…
Last Friday, June 13, Joe Smukler died. For anyone involved with the Soviet Jewry movement — and certainly for the refuseniks who spent years struggling to get out of the Soviet Union — the Smukler name was synonymous with the kind of dogged, unrelenting, year-in-year-out activism that defined the cause. Joe and his wife, Connie,…
The Israeli Presidential Conference, Shimon Peres’s vanity international blabfest, continues today with a series of panel discussions on the woes of the global economy and the future of the Jewish people. I don’t think we’ve solved the world’s economic problems, but there have been a few bombshells dropped into the field of Jewish identity. The…
In a whirlwind affair, 30 year-old Israeli grandmaster Alik Gershon broke a world record Thursday when he played 523 people simultaneously. The display took place in Rabin Square in Tel-Aviv and lasted over 19 hours. According to the New York Times, Gershon needed to beat at least 80 percent of his opponents and easily topped…
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