Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of tefillin, leather boxes and straps used in prayer by observant Jews.
Tefillin
The Latest
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Culture Uh, was Taylor Swift wearing tefillin at the VMAs?
Sure, some might call them 'gloves' — but that's so much less fun
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Fast Forward Hamas killed his family on Oct 7. At his bar mitzvah, he wore a Holocaust survivor’s tefillin — his grandfather’s
Ariel Zohar asked a search-and-rescue team to find the the tefillin in the wreckage of his family’s home
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Culture Apparently, tefillin are sexy — why do you think that is?
Maybe it's the godliness, maybe it's the leather
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Fast Forward New York garbage men help Williamsburg Jews go on an hours long tefillin hunt
A group of Brooklyn Jews went on an extended dumpster dive Monday night in a hunt for a sacred object: a pair of tefillin that had been accidentally discarded. The leather straps and boxes that Orthodox Jewish men wear to prayer, which contain holy scriptures, were noticed missing on Thursday according to NBC New York….
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Fast Forward The Met Museum updates tefillin description
(JTA) — Days after a small corner of the internet erupted with criticism of how the Metropolitan Museum of Art labeled a Jewish ritual object in its collection, the New York museum has quietly revised the description. Where its website had previously called tefillin, the leather boxes and straps used in prayer by observant Jews,…
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Fast Forward Debate ensues after Metropolitan Museum of Art labels tefillin as Egyptian amulet
(JTA) — The first time the Metropolitan Museum of Art tweeted a picture that appeared unmistakably to Jewish followers to be a ritual object used in Jewish prayer with the label “amulet,” a single follower responded with a correction. “That is not an Amulet it is a Jewish tefillin,” wrote an account from a New…
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Life “Not that kind of Jew:” Why I put on tefillin for the first time at 36
Not that kind of Jew. In the year since I moved to the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, I must have said this dozens of times in response to the enthusiastic calls of Chabad emissaries encouraging me to try wrapping tefillin. I’ve made plenty of excuses, both to myself and to the people on the…
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Life Queer? Trans? Female? Here’s How To Find Tefillin
There are literally hundreds of different ways of choosing, wrapping, and storing a set of tefillin [phylacteries]. Eichler’s Judaica superstore offers more than 2,000 tefillin-related items for purchase online alone, from a Swarovski crystal adorned bag, to a military camouflage case, and a strangely economical set of blinged-out gold plastic storage boxes—all to compliment the…
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