Author: Jesse Orine

(JTA) — British Jews are mourning Rabbi Abraham Levy, who led London’s historic Spanish and Portuguese community for decades, building up multiple institutions serving Sephardic Jews in the process. Levy died Dec. 24 at age 83, a decade after becoming emeritus spiritual head of the S&P Sephardi Community in London, following a 32-year period serving […]

IZMIR, Turkey (JTA) — Prague has the dubious honor of being chosen by Adolf Hitler to be a record of what he hoped would be the vanquished Jews of Europe. The Nazis left many of the city’s synagogues and Jewish sites relatively intact, intending to showcase them as the remnants of an extinct culture. That […]

(JTA) — Just a few years ago, Oman was expected to be next in line after Morocco, Sudan, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates to sign onto the Abraham Accords normalization agreements with Israel. On Friday, the country’s parliament voted to criminalize any relations or interactions with “the Zionist entity.” While the exact details have […]

(JTA) — Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth — commonly referred to as the United Kingdom’s chief rabbi — can now add a “Sir” to his title.  Mirvis will be named a “knight commander of the order of the British Empire,” according to King Charles’ New Year […]

(JTA) — Pinchas Goldshmidt, the former chief rabbi of Moscow who fled the country earlier this year, said other Russian Jews should leave before it’s too late in an interview with the Guardian.  “When we look back over Russian history, whenever the political system was in danger you saw the government trying to redirect the […]

BUCHAREST (JTA) — Watchdogs in Romania slammed an administrative unit of Bucharest’s city council for refusing to dismantle a bust honoring Mircea Vulcanescu, who served as a finance minister in the country’s pro-Nazi government during World War II. On Wednesday, Sector 2 of the city council voted down a resolution that would have removed the […]

(JTA) — In his first speech, Eli Cohen, Israel’s new foreign minister under Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government, has signaled that he will be pursuing less fractious ties with Russia, despite the ongoing war in Ukraine. In a speech on Monday, Cohen announced that he will be meeting Tuesday with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, something […]

(JTA) — For at least the fourth time since it was installed in 2014, vandals desecrated a Holocaust memorial in Thessaloniki, the Greek city that once boasted a Jewish plurality. A photo appearing Thursday on the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece website showed a red swastika daubed on a grave that symbolizes the […]