The beleaguered Schechter Day School Network — an educational pillar of Conservative Judaism — is considering leaving its parent organization as it grapples with shrinking enrollment and shuttered schools, the Forward has learned. The Schechter network has been under the aegis of the movement’s congregational arm, the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, since its founding…
At about 1 a.m. on the second night of Passover, Alexander “Aron” Goncharov stepped from Brodsky Synagogue, in the center of Kiev, into the cold night air. The 25-year-old yeshiva student, who was staying at the synagogue’s hostel, never returned to his room. After hours of frantic phone calls the following day, yeshiva authorities finally…
The letter has been liberated. We’ve been waiting to write that for a long time, ever since our Paul Berger went on a national search for George Washington’s original, iconic 1790 letter to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island, the one famously promising a new United States government that would give “to bigotry no sanction,…
After a decade hidden from view, one of the most important documents in American history is set to burst back onto public display, the Forward has learned. George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, in which the first president vowed that America would give “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution…
The Forward’s campaign to return to public view George Washington’s iconic letter on religious freedom started when reporter Paul Berger attended a lecture more than a year ago. Jonathan Sarna, one of the foremost historians of American Jewry, told the group that the original letter – one of the most important documents in American history…
Richard Morgenstern just wants to be left alone. But when you are the multimillionaire owner of one of the most important documents in American Jewish history — George Washington’s Letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, R.I. — avoiding the limelight is not easy. Especially when that document disappeared from public view 10 years ago…
Outside the Eldridge Street Synagogue, it was a regular Sunday on New York’s Lower East Side, as residents and tourists picked their way past stands piled high with Chinese greens and five-and-dime stores bearing signs written in Mandarin. Inside the historic sanctuary, visitors were transported back 125 years to the days when the signs were…
An annual ceremony held on Aug. 21 in Newport, R.I., commemorated George Washington’s famed letter to the Jews of Touro Synagogue. Gov. Lincoln Chafee attended and Malcolm Rogers, director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, recited Washington’s text, all 337 words of it, considered the defining expression of religious tolerance in the new…
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