Hired goons. A rottweiler. Sabotage. Coney Island. If you think this sounds like the plot from a classic crime epic about Brooklyn, you’d be right. But also these things relate to an ongoing lawsuit alleging one group’s “takeover” of a synagogue in the sleepy neighborhood of Seagate, at the far western edge of Coney Island….
Most job interviews are little more than sitting in a windowless room, answering questions from a manager with your resume in one hand and coffee in the other. For rabbis aiming for the pulpit, they’re a little different. This past winter, Temple Israel Center, a large Conservative synagogue in Westchester County, New York, had four…
A lifestyle brand-cum-real-estate-developer in Chicago has finished its renovation of an abandoned synagogue into a building of micro-apartments, Forbes reported. The building is the former Agudas Achim North Shore Synagogue, home to an Orthodox congregation in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood for a century. In 2016, developers bought the abandoned building, which had been vacant for ten…
Synagogues across New Zealand cancelled Shabbat services out of precaution after a shooter killed 49 worshippers at a mosque in that country on Friday. The leaders of Auckland Hebrew Congregation announced on their Facebook page that services there, as well as at other synagogues in Auckland and Wellington, would be cancelled after the shooting in…
A fringe YouTube personality was shot by a Los Angeles synagogue’s security guard after she live-streamed herself standing in front of the gate to the building. Zhoie Perez, 45, was shot Thursday outside the Etz Jacob Torah Center after filming for several minutes a guard gripping a handgun in reaction to her presence. She was…
At Temple Sholom, a Reform congregation in Chevy Chase, Maryland, they decided around the middle of last week that they should do something to help congregants furloughed from federal government jobs due to the political impasse over the border wall President Trump wants. “We looked at each other and said, ‘Okay, this isn’t gonna get…
As a French Jew, I am often asked about anti-Semitism in France. Without fail, the last question at any appearance I make is the same: Should French Jews leave and move to Israel or America? I always insist that Jews have played an instrumental role in founding modern-day France, and if anyone is going to…
For 30 years, the services at the East Brunswick Jewish Center, a Conservative synagogue in New Jersey, have suited PJ Smith just fine. They were strictly traditional: Only men counted toward the quorum of ten required to say the most important prayers, and only men could lead services or read from the Torah. But for…
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