SOSUA, Dominican Republic (JTA) — Sitting inside a small wood-frame shul just around the corner from Playa Alicia, where tourists sip rum punch while watching catamarans glide by, Joe Benjamin recounted one of the most uplifting but often forgotten stories of Jewish survival during the Holocaust. “I was bar mitzvahed right here,” he said, pointing […]
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(New York Jewish Week) — There’s an old joke about Israel (we’ll spare you the too-long set up) that ends, “Before you were a tourist — now you’ve made aliyah.” In other words, whatever preconceptions you had about Israel, they will be shattered once you make the decision to live there. Joel Chasnoff and Benji […]
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MADRID (JTA) — Vandals defaced the area in front of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement’s Barcelona synagogue with graffiti that read “Why do you kill in Palestine” early on Wednesday. The incident, which occurred on Yom Haatzmaut, or Israel’s independence day, prompted outrage from the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain, the Israelite Community of Barcelona and […]
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(JTA) — As many as 50,000 Jews traveled to a Hungarian town for the anniversary of a noted rabbi’s death this week, marking significant growth for the annual pilgrimage and generating what the town’s mayor called “culture shock” for non-Jewish locals. Since the fall of communism in 1989, Jewish pilgrims have been visiting Bodrogkeresztur, known […]
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(New York Jewish Week) — Barrier-smashing singer, actor and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte, who once boasted of being “the most popular Jew in America” because of his rendition of a Hebrew classic, died Tuesday at his longtime Upper West Side home. He was 96. The New York City native was the one of the […]
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(JTA) — Frankfurt’s administrative court ruled that the city can’t cancel a Roger Waters concert after calling him “one of the most widely known antisemites in the world.” Waters, the former frontman of the band Pink Floyd, took legal action and prevailed on Tuesday after Frankfurt officials said in February they would cancel his concert […]
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(JTA) — Sofia Richie, a model and the daughter of musician Lionel Richie, married Jewish music executive Elliot Grainge on Saturday, less than a month after she said she completed her conversion to Judaism. Earlier this month, Richie had posted on Instagram that Nathan Lam, a prominent Los Angeles cantor, had been “helping me along […]
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WARSAW (JTA) — A Jewish association has released what is being called the first report on antisemitism conducted with direct input from Polish Jewish community organizations, counting 488 incidents in 2022 submitted via an online portal and collected through extensive interviews with community members. The incident total released on Monday by the Czulent Jewish Association […]
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(JTA) — Britain’s Labour Party suspended senior lawmaker Diane Abbott for writing in a letter that Jews, Irish and Traveller people “experience prejudice” but “are not all their lives subject to racism.” Abbott, 69, who has represented a London constituency in parliament since 1987, wrote a letter to the editor of the Observer, a Sunday […]
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(JTA) — A new drama on Netflix centered on a haredi Orthodox family that runs a business in Antwerp’s famed diamond district hit the platform on Friday and is drawing comparisons to the hit Israeli series “Shtisel.” “Rough Diamonds,” a joint production from Israel’s Keshet International and Belgium’s De Mensen, follows the Wolfson family as […]
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