Sitting in synagogue on Yom Kippur, three days before Pope Francis’s arrival in Philadelphia, I couldn’t help but think about the scene unfolding outside my house. Already, metal crowd-control fences were lining my property right across the street from St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, where the pope would be sleeping. My little suburban block was in…
Nearly 50 years after the Vatican officially proclaimed Jews free of guilt in the killing of Jesus, Pope Francis made a surprise change to his schedule on the final day of his U.S. tour to convey his own message of respect for the Jewish people. In an unannounced event, the pontiff stopped Sunday to bless…
Israel will ask the United States government to encourage American Airlines to keep its Philadelphia-Tel Aviv flight route. American announced last week that it would discontinue the route beginning next year, solely for financial reasons. The route began flying in 2009, and has so far carried 95,000 passengers in 2015, according to Haaretz. But airline…
American Airlines is canceling its lone route to Israel solely because it was losing money on it, the airline told JTA. “Over the last year, the route lost more than $20 million,” Casey Norton, the airline’s director of corporate communications, told JTA in an email of the Philadelphia-Tel Aviv flight. “In fact, the route has…
The abrupt layoff of all editorial staffers at Philadelphia’s Jewish Exponent, the second-oldest Jewish newspaper in America, has highlighted the dire situation of local Jewish publications struggling to stay afloat. Fifteen journalists and production staffers were laid off on June 3 as part of a new experiment in the world of Jewish media: outsourcing editorial…
The Philadelphia Jewish Exponent has laid off its entire newsroom staff after handing editorial operations over to a media group that publishes Jewish papers in Baltimore and Washington D.C. Fifteen journalists and production staffers were let go at the nation’s second-oldest continuously published paper, according to a statement on its web site The paper’s editorial…
A suburban Philadelphia Jewish day school that closed down its teachers union has offered early retirement packages to more than half its faculty members. The Perelman Jewish Day School, a K-5 school affiliated with the Conservative movement’s Schechter Network, offered buyouts to 27 of its approximately 50 teachers, the Jewish Exponent reported. Thirteen teachers accepted…
The Amtrak train that hurtled off the tracks in Philadelphia left a trail of broken bodies and dreams. Among the dead are at least two Jews, both with inspiring stories. Justin Zemser, 20, was a midshipman at the Naval Academy heading back to his home in Queens, New York. Rachel Jacobs was a 39-year-old mom…
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