Germany’s largest Jewish communal organization, the Berlin Juedische Gemeinde, is nearly dysfunctional. “We are at the edge of chaos,” said Rabbi Josh Spinner, executive vice president and CEO in Berlin of the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation. “All the world’s Jews should care about this.” Claudia Keller, writing in the respected newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, observed that…
There is no shortage of people willing to take a credit for the Soviet Jewry movement. Take it from me. I know this to be true. While on tour with my book, I don’t remember a single reading where someone in the audience didn’t chew me out about why their Uncle Murray wasn’t included in…
Forward Looking Back brings you the stories that were making news in the Forward’s Yiddish paper 100, 75, and 50 years ago. Check back each week for a new set of illuminating, edifying and sometimes wacky clippings from the Jewish past. 100 Years Ago 1913 New Jersey’s Jews are furious after discovering that a number…
Complaints by Russian-speaking immigrants prompted an ultra-Orthodox party in Israel to pull a TV commercial plugging their election campaign which shows a man recoiling in horror at discovering his bride is not Jewish. In the advert, a Russian-accented bride receives a faxed certificate during her wedding ceremony attesting to her conversion to Judaism. With disgust…
Some news, apparently, is fit to print, but not too boldly. Take, for example, the demure self-censorship on display Saturday in the New York Times’ eye-opening report, headlined “On Island, Largely Blue, an Exception: Trump Tower,” on the handful of New York City neighborhoods that voted for Mitt Romney over President Obama. Overall, the city…
For the past six months Blognik Beat has been dedicated to exploring the past, present, and future of Russian-Jewry. Its bloggers have reached back into time to re-tell the story of their ancestors, of their hardships in the Soviet Republic and their struggles in acclimating to a new world. But this blog has not strictly…
Last Friday, June 13, Joe Smukler died. For anyone involved with the Soviet Jewry movement — and certainly for the refuseniks who spent years struggling to get out of the Soviet Union — the Smukler name was synonymous with the kind of dogged, unrelenting, year-in-year-out activism that defined the cause. Joe and his wife, Connie,…
For more than half of my life, I was not a citizen of any country. For twelve years, I had to append every application, every interview, and every flight with a long explanation of my life. For all of my teen years, I was a glitch in the civic duty system. From 1999 until 2010,…
100% of profits support our journalism
