Author: Jesse Orine

LONDON (JTA) — Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz was a teenager when she began to feel Judaism calling her back. Her family had left the synagogue behind, and in the mid-1970s she was living in Cornwall, about as far away from Britain’s Jewish centers as one can. She wrote letters to Jewish institutions and asked them to send […]

(JTA) — A century ago, communists shuttered the synagogues of Tomsk, one of the oldest cities in Siberia. It was a painful blow, especially to the local community of Jewish Cantonists — former soldiers who had been recruited against their will or abducted into the Russian Tsar’s army and forbidden from practicing their faith. After […]

(JTA) — Ephraim Einhorn, a rabbi and businessman who helmed Taiwan’s fledgling Jewish community after a career that included clandestine missions on behalf of oppressed Jews, has died. Einhorn’s death on Wednesday morning in Taipei, just hours before the beginning of Yom Kippur, came after an extended illness and weeks of intermittent hospitalizations. He had […]

(JTA) — Several men dressed like Nazis were seen pretending to arrest a man wearing a yellow star as part of a rally against COVID-19 measures in the Netherlands. Saturday’s incident in Urk, near Amsterdam, was the latest among the hundreds of rallies worldwide in which protesters have drawn what they regard as parallels between […]

(JTA) — Some of the Jewish organizational officials flying into the coastal city of Durban, South Africa, on the last week of August 2001 were excited. They believed the U.N.’s anti-racism conference there would be an opportunity to exchange notes on a cause that the Jewish world had worked on for decades. Others, steeped in […]

(JTA) — The Taliban, the extremist Islamist movement once famously insular, is ready to build relations with the world — except for Israel. Suhail Shaheen, the spokesman for the movement that assumed control of Afghanistan last month, told Sputnik News that his country is ready to work with the United States and other countries in […]

(JTA) – More than 100 headstones were smashed at a Jewish cemetery in Argentina that had seen similar damage in 2009. The vandalism at the Tablada Cemetery in the Buenos Aires area was discovered on Sunday, the Jewish news site Visavis reported. The headstones were between the cemetery’s older section and the new one, which […]

(JTA) — Zebulon Simantov, the last remaining Jew in Afghanistan, has finally left the country for fear of persecution by the Taliban, an Israeli television channel reported. Simantov, the 62-year-old former keeper of Kabul’s lone remaining synagogue, left the country for the United States in recent days with several other exiles, the Kan broadcaster in […]

(JTA) — Police in London have arrested a man in connection with a series of six assaults on Jews in areas of the city with large Jewish communities. The assaults began Aug. 18, when somebody struck Jews on the street during the day in the northern neighborhood of Hackney, then kept walking briskly away. The […]