Aliza Gettenberg of Lawrence, New York, knew she wanted to become a dentist after someone’s description of the occupation as the “perfect combination of doctor, engineer and artist” struck a chord with her. But first she had to find a dental school that fit her professional vision. She sought a program focused on dentistry’s digital future, […]
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Sasha Chanoff recalls the day he was forced to make one of the most painful decisions of his life. It was 2000, only six years after the genocide in Rwanda, and Chanoff — a Finnish-born Jew working with the International Organization for Migration — was sent to neighboring Congo on a risky mission: drive to […]
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TEL AVIV — During a week when Israel faced multiple ballistic missile attacks from Yemen and renewed rocket fire out of Gaza, the 500 or so Israelis with Soviet roots who gathered in Tel Aviv on Dec. 29 for a full-day festival of Jewish learning didn’t seem much perturbed. “Even in these hard and complicated […]
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As 350 Jews with roots in the former Soviet Union gathered recently for a weekend conference at a Canadian Niagara Falls resort, Montreal was experiencing one of the worst outbreaks of antisemitic violence in Canada in this century. Hundreds of protesters smashed shop windows, attacked police officers, set fire to cars, and waved Hamas and […]
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Writing a comprehensive history of Polish citizens during the Holocaust is a hefty task. A Polish law that criminalizes any mention of Polish responsibility for or complicity in Nazi crimes makes it even harder. That makes the groundbreaking research conducted by acclaimed Holocaust historian Jan Grabowski for his new book, “On Duty: The Polish Blue […]
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In a year filled with challenges, charitable giving has been a source of unity and resilience, particularly for the Jewish community expressing support and solidarity in response to the October 7th attack. Israel-related causes saw a surge in donations, with much of the aid directed to those impacted by the war. In the first six […]
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For half a millennium until the Holocaust, the cosmopolitan city of Thessaloniki, Greece, had a unique claim to fame: it was Europe’s only major city with a Jewish majority. But the golden age of Thessaloniki’s mostly Sephardic Ladino-speaking Jewish community came to a sudden end with the Nazi occupation of Greece in 1941 and turned […]
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Nearly 20 years ago, Amy Bach, a young lawyer and journalist, spent time in a courtroom in rural Georgia to write about routine injustices in the legal system. She watched as a public defender pleaded 48 of his clients guilty in a single day. “He didn’t know their names or their faces or their cases. […]
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In March 2020, around the time B. and her husband started planning to have children, they learned they each carried genetic mutations with significantly elevated risks for a variety of cancers. BRCA genetic mutations, which are 10 times more common among Ashkenazi Jews than among the general U.S. population, significantly increase the risks of developing […]
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NEW YORK — When Sasha Chanoff received the $100,000 Charles Bronfman Prize in 2010 for his work helping refugees worldwide find safe haven, jobs and social stability, he used the occasion of the awards ceremony in New York to introduce a family that his organization had helped reunite. The emotional event sparked a turning […]
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