The High Holidays are here. Synagogues will swell with their biggest crowds of the year on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. But in the wake of the Pittsburgh and Poway shootings in the past year, and amid a nation-wide uptick in anti-Semitic incidents, American Jewish communities are on edge. What role can you, as a…
As the High Holidays near, some religious Jews are considering an unusual question: Are swords like jewelry? In the time of the Talmud, one stream of rabbinic thought considered swords to be an adornment — and thus permissible to carry in a synagogue on the Sabbath and holidays. After a year in which a dozen…
The wake-up call for the Brooklyn Heights Synagogue came the morning 11 Jews at prayer were killed in Pittsburgh. The Reform congregation created a security committee and quickly began planning and implementing changes. Because they did not have a deep rainy-day fund to draw on, they cut the facilities budget, and added a $190 security…
Jared Kushner, senior White House adviser and President Trump’s son-in-law, was the official whose security clearance was denied last year, The Washington Post reported. He was listed as “Senior White House Official 1” in recently released documents, according to people with insight on the matter. Tricia Newbold, of the White House’s personnel security office, gave…
Entering Jerusalem from the Shomron area in the West Bank this morning, my navigation system took me on a new path that I had never driven down before. Although new to me, this road has been getting a lot of media attention, dubbed by some as “the Apartheid road” because it runs side by side…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Thousands of potential visitors to Israel were turned away in 2018 when they reached the country. Of the about 4 million visitors to Israel in 2018, nearly 19,000 were turned away by immigration staff when they reached an entry point over concerns that they would commit criminal or security crimes in the…
Jewish billionaire Paul Singer’s foundation plans to donate $1 million to security upgrades at New York City synagogues in the wake of last month’s massacre in a Pittsburgh synagogue, the New York Post reported. The funds will cover safety reviews, security camera installation, security barriers and other security additions, depending on the synagogue’s location and…
I learned I was an Arab in the third grade. I was staring at a map of the world while waiting for the bus and noticed my last name emblazoned on a large body of water in Egypt. With the fervor of any young kid who sees their own name on something, I raced home…
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