At least 44 members of a New York synagogue are calling for the resignation of their rabbi, whose custom of inviting young men to meet with him naked in a sauna has brought extensive media attention. In an email petition sent Sunday, members of the Riverdale Jewish Center, an Orthodox congregation in the Bronx, urged…
Rabbi Avi Weiss “Retire is a word I’d like to retire,” said my rabbi, Rav Avi Weiss, from the pulpit he has held for over 40 years. Over the holiday of Shemini Atzeret, Rav Avi announced that he would step back from his position as senior rabbi at the synagogue he helped found, The Hebrew…
Rabbi Avi Weiss, a religiously progressive voice within Orthodoxy who has spearheaded the push to give women a greater role in the faith, announced he is stepping down on Thursday. Speaking from the pulpit of his Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, Weiss told the packed congregation of his plans to end his tenure as rabbi. Many…
Emily Weisberg knows good coffee. Over the phone, I drooled as she described the rich, bold, bitter aromas that put my mug full of reheated office-coffee-pot coffee to shame. She said, “I’ve been a barista for more than 10 years. My background is in coffee.” That’s why she’s opening Moss Café in Riverdale, NY. Growing…
Phil Baum, the former executive director at the American Jewish Congress, died at home in Riverdale, N.Y. Baum, who served in senior positions at the AJC for more than five decades, died in his sleep on Wednesday night. He was in 90s. He began at the Jewish advocacy organization in the late 1940s shortly after…
When we think of great New York poets — Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman and Laurie Anderson, among others — what they’ve immortalized and exalted have been the streets and energies of Manhattan or, on rare and less transcendent occasions, Brooklyn. The Bronx, when it did appear, has always been something of the…
When I stepped into the living room of Jonathan Tropper’s large house in the unpretentious Westchester suburb of New Rochelle, I had a nervous pause: Had I caught him at a bad moment? It looked like he had just moved in, and most of his furniture hadn’t yet arrived. The walls were bare, and there…
Miriam Rosenbaum is not your typical yeshiva girl, though she is deeply devout and modest to a fault. The Princeton University senior is the first Orthodox woman to win a Rhodes Scholarship ? and she wants to use the honor to champion the education of Jewish girls. ?I hope that Orthodox girls realize they can…
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