This is the Forward’s coverage of rabbis, the spiritual leaders of Jewish congregations.
Rabbis
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Fast Forward Orthodox Rabbinical Council Appoints New Conversion Director
The Orthodox Union’s rabbinic arm has created a new position to help smooth the conversion process. The Rabbinical Council of America announced Monday that Abby Lerner will be the first National Director of Conversion Services. Lerner will “assume responsibility for the support of candidates in their conversion process,” according to an RCA statement. She will…
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Community The David Friedman I Know
The night the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved the nomination of David Friedman as President Donald Trump’s Ambassador to Israel, Friedman celebrated the way he wanted. It was the way many who know, respect and like David Friedman expected. David took his wife, their children and spouses to a local kosher casual restaurant and ate…
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Fast Forward Israeli Army Rabbi ‘Not Sorry’ For Disparaging Female Soldiers
Rabbi Yigal Levinstein, the head of a prominent pre-army training academy in the occupied West Bank, is standing his ground after his denigrating remarks about women soldiers made waves in the Israel. “They recruit them to the army, where they enter as Jews, but they’re not Jews by the time they leave,” Levinstein said, in…
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Fast Forward World’s Oldest Jew Dies At 117 — Leaves Behind 125 Descendants
He was born when the Ottoman Empire still ruled modern-day Israel, the British held his native Iraq and Jews were spread throughout the Middle East. But the 117-year-old Rabbi Zecharia Barashi on Tuesday left a world very different from the one he found, as Israel’s oldest resident – and the world’s oldest Jew and rabbi…
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Fast Forward Chabad Rabbi Banned From Lithuania’s Main Synagogue
(JTA) — In an escalation of the internal feud dividing Lithuanian Jews, the Chabad movement’s senior emissary to the country was banned from the capital city’s main synagogue. Rabbi Sholem Ber Krinsky, who has lived in Vilnius for 22 years, was informed in an email Monday from the chairman of the Vilnius Jewish Religious Community…
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Fast Forward Ex-Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger Gets 4-1/2 Years For Fraud
JERUSALEM (JTA) – A judge in Jerusalem rejected a plea deal between prosecutors and Yona Metzger, a former Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel. Under the deal signed in January, Metzger pleaded guilty to fraud, breach of trust and tax offenses. The Jerusalem District Court judge sentenced Metzger to 4.5 years in jail, more than the…
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Opinion The Political Rabbi’s Survival Guide
On my desk, there is a small black and white photograph depicting the late Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld of Cleveland, his face bloody from a beating that he suffered at the hands of segregationists in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, during the Freedom Summer of 1964. It is now more than a half century later, and from what I…
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News Her Journey From Hasidic Rabbi To (Happy) Transgender Woman
Abby Stein is almost certainly the only ordained Hasidic rabbi who is also a woman. Stein wasn’t female when ordained, of course. She was a young man, soon to be married to a woman also from the strict Satmar community in which they were both raised. While Stein – then named Yisroel and nicknamed Srully…
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Yiddish World A glimpse of the Jewish left in 1920s Palestine
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Fast Forward 2 more deceased hostages, including only woman, returned to Israel as Hamas says it has freed all it can
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Fast Forward Simchat Torah in Hostages Square lays bare divide over just how much to celebrate yet
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Opinion War strained the Israel-Vatican bond. Will the pope use the ceasefire to heal those wounds?
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