When 77-year-old Rabbi Richard Nolan recalls Ben Ammi ben Israel, the leader of the Hebrew Israelite community in Israel who died last weekend, their shared hometown of Chicago is wrapped up in that recollection. And the image is bleak. “There was degradation, segregation, discrimination, lack of education and opportunity,” Nolan said. “A people who had…
Rabbi Leonard Beerman, famed for his unremitting pacifism and fight against injustice, has died. Beerman, who grew the congregation of Leo Baeck Temple from a small community of 28 members when he arrived in 1949 into one of the most prominent synagogues in Los Angeles, died on Dec. 24 at the age of 93. “With…
(JTA) — As a pathbreaking thinker, innovator and activist, Rabbi Harold Schulweis’ role extended far beyond his base as the spiritual leader of his Los Angeles-area congregation. “Harold Schulweis was widely regarded as the most successful and influential synagogue leader in his generation, a public intellectual who redefined what it is to be a Jew, an…
The man credited with inventing the first home video games, Ralph Baer, died on Saturday at age 92 at his home in Manchester, New Hampshire, a director at the Goodwin Funeral Home said on Monday. Baer, who fled his native Germany with his family in 1938 ahead of the Second World War, spent much of…
Triumphant in 2005 after accepting the James Beard award for ‘Olive Trees and Honey.’ The Jewish culinary world has lost one of its brightest lights. Gil Marks, avid food historian and author of the pivotal “Encyclopedia of Jewish Food,” for which he earned a place on the Forward 50 in 2010, died in Jerusalem today…
Claire Barry, with her sister, Merna, on the cover of their 1961 album ‘Side by Side.’ Claire Barry, who crossed over from the world of Yiddish entertainment to global pop stardom as half of The Barry Sisters, died Monday in Aventura, Florida. She was 94. At the height of their popularity in the 1950s and…
On Sunday night, Rabbi Hailu Moshe Paris, who had been at Manhattan’s Beth Israel Medical Center for three weeks, was blinking and smiling at the small group of Jews gathered around his bed. He could not speak, he wore an oxygen mask and was attached to an IV, but he nodded slightly as the group…
When Daniel Pinkwater learned on November 3 that Car Talk host Tom Magliozzi had died, he sent a one-line condolence to Doug Berman, the show’s longtime producer: “He improved the lives of millions. Weekly. For decades. They give Nobel Prizes to the wrong people.” Tom, better known as Click (or was he Clack?), co-hosted the…
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