This is the Forward’s coverage of rabbis, the spiritual leaders of Jewish congregations.
Rabbis
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Fast Forward Embattled French Chief Rabbi Gilles Bernheim Quits Amid Plagiarism Scandal
Gilles Bernheim, the Chief Rabbi of France, quit his post on Thursday after admitting to plagiarism in two books and to deception about his academic credentials. The Paris Central Consistory, the top Jewish religious organisation in France, said in a statement that Bernheim was resigning and gave no further details. Bernheim, 60, a modern Orthodox…
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Life Coming Out of the Child-Free Closet
In February 1997, Ellen Jaffe Gill’ s essay on not wanting to have children, was published in Moment Magazine. In the piece, Jaffe Gill (then McClain) discussed how her decision not to have children did not prevent her from engaging fully in Jewish life. As a writer, she was in fact transmitting the covenant on…
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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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News As young Jews move away from Israel, Jewish leaders are reluctant to change their approach
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