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Fast Forward French Chief Rabbi Won’t Quit Over Plagiarism
Gilles Bernheim, the chief rabbi of France, refused to quit on Tuesday despite admitting to several counts of plagiarism and deception about his academic credentials. The revelations have shocked France’s 600,000-strong Jewish community and Bernheim has come under pressure to quit, but he said resigning would be a “desertion” as he came clean on one…
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News David Stav Aims To Oust Haredim From Israeli Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Post
Israel’s Haredim may be on the cusp of losing even more of their power following their exclusion from the new government. If David Stav gets his way, they will no longer control the rabbinate. The self-styled iconoclast is standing in the election for Ashkenazi chief rabbi this summer, and already has the support of several…
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Fast Forward French Chief Rabbi Gilles Berhnheim Admits Lifting Passages for Book
Gilles Bernheim, The Chief Rabbi of France has admitted that he plagiarized parts of his book, “Forty Jewish Meditations. “ “The plagiarizing unmasked on the Internet is true,” Bernheim wrote in a statement from Israel, where he was spending the Passover holidays, Le Monde reported. Suspicion about the origins of the book, published in 2011…
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Culture Robert Frost Rarely Went to Church, But Poet Had Personal Rabbi
Although Robert Frost rarely attended church, America’s supreme poet of pastoral life had his own personal rabbi. Victor Reichert, rabbi of the Rockdale Avenue Temple, in Cincinnati, was one of Frost’s closest friends and confidants in the final decades of the poet’s life. Now, Reichert’s son, Jonathan Reichert, has donated his father’s trove of letters,…
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News Reconstructionists Look for Leader To Weather Challenging Time
Reconstructionist Judaism is suddenly leaderless, six months into a dramatic effort to save the movement through a reorganization of its key institutions. In the sweeping membership crisis that has rocked North America’s non-Orthodox Jewish denominations in the past decade, perhaps no denomination has faced greater peril than the Reconstructionists. During its half century of existence,…
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Opinion As Yeshiva Child Sex Abuse Scandal Grows, Why Are We Afraid To Speak Out?
We in the Orthodox Jewish community claim to value children deeply. We want to have children, and we pressure our own children to get married and have children, and yet, when it comes to really ensuring those children’s utmost protection from harm, somehow the silence is deafening. As a Yeshiva University alumnus and a psychotherapist…
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Fast Forward Innocent Man Who Served 23 Years for Satmar Rabbi Slay Suffers Heart Attack
The innocent man freed after serving 23 years in prison for the murder of a Brooklyn rabbi suffered a serious heart attack just a day after being released, his lawyer said. David Ranta, 58, was freed Thursday after more than two decades behind bars for the 1990 robbery slaying of Rabbi Chaskel Werzberger, a member…
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Fast Forward Innocent Man Freed 23 Years After Murder of Hasidic Rabbi Chaskel Werzberger
A New York man convicted of killing a Hasidic rabbi more than two decades ago was freed on Thursday after his conviction was vacated as a miscarriage of justice. David Ranta, 58, spent 23 years in prison until the conviction integrity unit of the Brooklyn district attorney’s office concluded after a year-long investigation that the…
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