TRUSKAVETS, Ukraine (JTA) — Nearly 600 Jews stand shoulder-to-shoulder, eyes trained on the young man leading the service to close out Shabbat. The crowd sings a soulful havdalah tune that lifts up its final words: “hamavdil ben kodesh l’chol” — “the One who divides between sacred and ordinary.” It looks like a Shabbat gathering anywhere […]
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(New York Jewish Week) — In 2004, June Hersh and her family sold the Bronx-based lighting business that her father founded almost 50 years earlier. Hersh, along with her mother, sister and their husbands, all worked there. The day of the sale, her sister, Andrea Greene, turned to Hersh and said: “We did well! Now, […]
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(JTA) — In the months after Russian tanks rolled into her country last February, the music largely stopped for Elizaveta Sherstuk. The founder of a Jewish choral ensemble called Aviv in her hometown of Sumy, in the northeastern flank of Ukraine, Sherstuk had to put singing aside in favor of her day job and personal […]
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(New York Jewish Week) – In “Pictures from Home,” a new Broadway play, a photographer takes on a nearly 10-year project to chronicle the lives of his aging parents. As the son snaps pictures and interrogates his parents in their Southern California home, the three offer very different versions of their shared past and spar […]
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(JTA) — Moses Elisaf, thought to be the first Jewish mayor of a city in Greece, died at 68 on Friday after a brief battle with cancer. Elisaf, mayor of Ioannina since 2019, was hospitalized during a work trip to Athens in December, the Kathimerini newspaper reported. He extended his hospital stay on Dec. 19, […]
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(JTA) — When he was 13 years old, Josh Greene moved with his family to San Clemente, California, a city known as one of the best spots for surfing on the West Coast. Greene quickly fell in love with the sport, even holding his bar mitzvah party at a local museum dedicated to it. As […]
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(JTA) — The United Kingdom’s Labour Party is no longer being monitored by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, as the public watchdog announced Wednesday that the party had taken sufficient measures to root out an antisemitism problem that plagued it for years under former leader Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn’s successor Keir Starmer hailed the announcement […]
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(JTA) — The remaining few Jews of Antakya have been transferred to Istanbul, where they are staying in a Jewish nursing home thanks to a collaboration between the Turkish Jewish community there, a Kazakh-Israeli billionaire and Israel’s fundraising organization Keren Hayesod. While there have been a variety of ways for survivors to leave Turkey in […]
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(New York Jewish Week) — Amid reports of rising antisemitism, comedian Sarah Silverman, who’s currently guest-hosting “The Daily Show,” took to the streets of Manhattan in search of Jewish allies — or “pro-Semitism,” as she calls it. In a charming spot, which aired on Wednesday night’s episode of “The Daily Show,” the Jewish funnywoman stands […]
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BERLIN (JTA) — The prominent German rabbi who was found to have abused his authority at the seminary he ran also appears to have plagiarized a portion of his 1992 dissertation. That’s according to a new investigation into Rabbi Walter Homolka published this week in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a German newspaper. More than 60 […]
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