This is the Forward’s coverage of rabbis, the spiritual leaders of Jewish congregations.
Rabbis
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Fast Forward Dutch Chief Rabbi Says Men Sped Car at Him
Dutch Chief Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs filed a complaint with police against two men whom he said tried to intimidate him at a gas station. Jacobs, chief rabbi of the Interprovincial Rabbinate for The Netherlands, filed the complaint last week after two men on Nov. 5 drove a BMW car in his direction in a sudden…
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Fast Forward Sephardic Chief Rabbi Forbids Israelis From Going to Temple Mount
An Israeli chief rabbi urged Jews to stay away from the Temple Mount to prevent bloodshed. Yitzhak Yosef, Israel’s chief Sehardic rabbi, made the call during the funeral Friday of Shalom Ba’adani, 17 who died that morning in hospital from wounds he sustained on Wednesday when a Palestinian terrorist hit him and 12 others with…
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News For Many Converts, Bumpy Road to Mikveh Only Beginning of Woes
(JTA) — There was the convert who was barred from a synagogue on Yom Kippur, the Jamaican convert whose boyfriend’s rabbi offered him a coveted synagogue honor if only he’d dump her, the grandmother who told her granddaughter she’d be going to hell because she became a Jew. The road to conversion can be long…
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Fast Forward Israel Moves To Ease Path to Conversion
(JTA) — The Israeli government has adopted a major reform expected to ease the path to conversion for hundreds of thousands of Israelis now prohibited from marrying in the Jewish state. In the most significant response in decades to the estimated 400,000 Israelis who are not considered Jewish by the Chief Rabbinate, the Cabinet expanded authority…
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Culture Channeling Freud To Prevent the Next Barry Freundel
(Haaretz) — I was sitting in a group discussion with fellow psychotherapists recently when a colleague mentioned that one of his female patients had, unannounced, come over and sat down on his lap. Someone else shared the revelation that one of his female patients intimated a desire to see him without any clothes on. The therapists…
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Fast Forward After Mikveh Scandal, Rabbinic Council Appoint Committee To Review Conversion
The Rabbinical Council of America has formed a committee to review its conversion process in the wake of the arrest on voyeurism charges of one of its leading conversion rabbis. The RCA announced Wednesday the men and women appointed to a committee to review its current Geirus Protocol and Standards conversion process and suggest safeguards…
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Opinion Why the Mikveh Scandal Cuts So Deep
The sordid story of the Washington rabbi accused of spying on naked women in his synagogue’s ritual bath is more than just a local scandal, an Orthodox scandal, a conversion scandal. It is a Jewish scandal, tearing deep into the heart of a religious hierarchy that is dominated by men who are rarely held to…
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Fast Forward Women’s Yeshiva Says Male Rabbis Don’t Have To Oversee Converts in Mikveh
In the wake of voyeurism allegations against a prominent Orthodox rabbi, the head of an Orthodox yeshiva for women is arguing that male rabbis needn’t be present for a female convert’s ritual immersion. Rabbi Jeffrey Fox, the Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshivat Maharat in New York, is preparing a teshuva, or Jewish legal opinion, arguing that…
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News No Jews allowed: White supremacists are building a segregated community in Arkansas, but is it legal?
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News Zohran Mamdani has represented Astoria’s Jews for 4 years. What do they think of him?
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News Curtis Sliwa has a plan to beat Zohran Mamdani in NYC mayor’s race — and it starts with apologizing to Jews
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News What Zohran Mamdani has actually said about Jews, Israel and antisemitism
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Opinion Right-wing insurrectionists tried to topple the German government in 1920 — it’s happening again in Trump’s America
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Theater Can a kinky new Yiddish musical resurrect a lost art — and one man who got spanked to death?
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Fast Forward Josh Shapiro’s Judaism was not why Kamala Harris snubbed him, new book claims
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Yiddish דאָקטוירים פֿון אַן אַנדער שניטDoctors of a different sort
די ווילנער דאָקטוירים יעקבֿ וויגאָדסקי און צמח שאַבאַד זענען אויך געווען געזעלשאַפֿטלעכע טוער.
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