Category: World News

(JR) — Volodymyr Zelensky met with 32 Chabad emissaries and rabbis Thursday night ahead of Rosh Hashanah, marking the Jewish president of Ukraine’s first official meeting with Jewish leaders since Russia invaded in February 2022. Also in attendance were 15 Jewish soldiers whom Zelensky presented with medals. During the meeting, Zelensky made his latest appeal […]

(JR) — A new synagogue billing itself as a neo-Hasidic congregation has opened in the former East German city of Dresden, without the backing of Germany’s main Jewish communal umbrella organization. The Jewish Community Dresden, or JKD, was founded two years ago by Akiva Weingarten, who received his first ordination in the Satmar Hasidic sect in […]

(JR) — I regularly post Middle Eastern Jewish feminist content on social media, so right when Mahsa Amini was murdered, TikTok’s algorithm flooded my account with videos of women from Iran, giving a play-by-play account of events. Amini was a 22-year-old woman from Kurdistan, visiting her relatives in Tehran. Despite the fact that she was […]

(JR) — Police in Argentina have raided and closed down a publishing house that they say was distributing Nazi literature online. They also arrested a man who was first raided for distributing Nazi propaganda in violation of Argentine law more than a decade ago. At the time, Pablo Giorgetti was a university student; now, he […]

(JR) — The U.S., Israeli and Ukrainian governments have all called it an extremely dangerous voyage into the heart of an ongoing war. But despite the warnings, tens of thousands of Jewish men and boys are expected to travel to Uman, Ukraine, for an annual Rosh Hashanah pilgrimage that pays tribute to the influential Hasidic […]

MELBOURNE (JR) — Ruth Hannah has lived in the Australian coastal town of Mallacoota for more than 30 years. The 72-year-old daughter of Holocaust survivors knows of only one other Jewish person in her town, which has a population of 1,183 people. Known for its beautiful beaches and wildlife, Mallacoota is located near the middle […]

(JR) — A catalog of calamities is central to the liturgy of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Jewish High Holidays that begin later this week. We Jews are asked to imagine ourselves perched on the precipice of life and death. Nothing frames it as starkly as Unetaneh Tokef, the roll call of ruin enumerating various […]

(JR) – A prominent member of an American neo-Nazi group has been extradited to the Netherlands, where he will stand trial for projecting an antisemitic message onto the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Robert Wilson is accused of being behind a February incident in which a message was laser-projected onto the house where Anne Frank […]

(JR) — Jews and Jewish sites appear to have largely been spared following the devastating earthquake that struck Morocco late Friday, killing at least 2,100 people and plunging some of the poorest areas of the Northwest African country into ruins. The export of etrogs, the citrus fruit harvested locally and used ritually in the upcoming festival […]

PORTO, Portugal (JR) — In this city on Portugal’s northwestern coast, a small Jewish community has dedicated years to identifying its predecessors who were killed or expelled in the Portuguese Inquisition of 1536 to 1821. Drawing on newly digitized records, the community was able to identify 842 people, ranging from 10 to 110 years old, […]