A stolen Torah scroll uncovered by an Iranian volunteer militia was returned to the Shiraz Jewish community, the Fars News Agency reported. Members of the Basij located the ancient scroll taken from a Shiraz synagogue. The scroll was returned to the community at a ceremony on Feb. 11, the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution’s victory,…
A Holocaust commemoration group brought from Poland to Israel a drum that was made out of a Torah scroll and belonged to a Nazi sympathizer. The drum was found last month by volunteers of the From The Depths organization in the basement of a man who lived in a village near the central Polish city…
When studying Talmud, it’s easy to be desensitized to the real-life implications of even the most sensitive issues — rape, for example. So, as we at Yeshivat Har Etzion study the third chapter of the Talmudic tractate Ketubot, a chapter devoted to the crimes of rape and seduction, it’s easy to forget (especially when using…
Getty Images Just a few months before he was killed in a 1996 bus bombing, my JTS classmate Matt Eisenfeld held a party in his Jerusalem apartment. It was a Saturday night, but it was hardly a typical Saturday night event. It was a siyyum, a conclusion of study, celebrating his completion of Masechet Kiddushin,…
A respected Conservative clergyman, Gil Steinlauf, senior rabbi of Washington’s Adas Israel Congregation wrote his congregants a moving letter shortly after Yom Kippur. In it, he announced that he and his wife of 20 years, Batya, would be divorcing. That alone would have been surprise enough for his congregation, considering the model marriage, complete with…
On a recent weekday morning, Rabbi Greg Wall blew a 3-foot-long shofar off the coast of Norwalk, Connecticut. It was part of a Talmud class he teaches regularly aboard a 23-foot sailboat named Enough. Wall is better known for blowing a saxophone at jazz performances, but this particular gig is part of his day job…
Demonstrators protest the killing of teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri / Getty Images After weeks upon weeks of news reports that detail what seemed to be never-ending violence in Israel and Gaza, compounded by accounts of a rise in anti-Semitic attacks in Europe and Canada and even across the United States, it would have…
Lukas Kranach the Elder (JTA) — For some Hasidim, the Torah is too hot to handle. A recently published Bible study guide in use in a Hasidic village in suburban New York omits certain risque passages and entire passages of the Book of Genesis, according to Israeli scholar and blogger David Assaf of Tel Aviv…
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