Ayelet Tsabari, author of “The Best Place On Earth,” is the winner of the 2015 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Tsabari takes home $100,000 for winning the prize, which was announced Monday. The collection of short stories explores Israeli history through the eyes of Mizrahi characters. “I grew up not seeing myself and my…
The Jewish Book Council has named the five finalists of this year’s Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, the Forward has learned. Carolyn Hessel, director of the Jewish Book Council, told the Forward that the five finalists are Sarah Bunin Benor for “Becoming Frum: How Newcomers Learn the Language and Culture of Orthodox Judaism”; Matti…
● The Wanting By Michael Lavigne Schocken Books, 336 pages, $25.95 ‘The Wanting” starts with a bang — literally — when a body part flies past the large plate-glass window of Roman Guttman’s office. Roman is pretty sure it was a head. He sees the head go by, then he hears the explosion; then his…
The Jewish Book Council has announced the finalists for this year’s Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. The $100,000 prize is one of the largest literary awards in the world and recognizes emerging writers who examine the Jewish experience. It is given for fiction and non-fiction in alternating years. This year’s fiction finalists include Shani…
When Sami Rohr was a young real estate developer living in Bogotá, Colombia, in the 1950s, fundraisers from abroad often came to collect money from the local Jewish community. While Rohr donated to all of them, and encouraged his employees to do the same, emissaries from the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement impressed him more than others….
Sami Rohr, a major philanthropist whose giving created and sustained hundreds of Chabad Lubavitch houses around the world, died at the age of 86. Rohr, who died Sunday in South Florida and was buried Tuesday in Jerusalem, reportedly gave some $250 million to Jewish causes, especially Jewish education and culture, throughout the world through his…
I just learned of the death yesterday of Sami Rohr, the businessman and philanthropist powerhouse behind the growth of Chabad around the world. He was also the namesake of an incredible literary prize that his children endowed in his name on his 80th birthday and that I was so grateful to receive this past year….
The fearless refuseniks who attempted to hijack an airplane on June 15, 1970, in Leningrad in order to draw attention to the plight of Soviet Jews were “Zionist hooligans” to Soviet authorities, but to the writer Gal Beckerman they are nothing less than superheroes. In the summer of 2006, Beckerman found himself at a barbecue…
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