The German government has agreed to allocate $1.5 billion in Holocaust reparations this year, setting a new record for how much the country is spending to support survivors. The increase from a total of $1.4 billion last year is due to a rise in the amount the government is paying to reimburse survivors’ medical expenses. But the sum paid directly to survivors has once again declined, reflecting the accelerating deaths of survivors. And the growth [...]
In a bittersweet ceremony held on Sunday, June 23, the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh broke ground for a memorial and a new Tree of Life building. The synagogue was the scene of a mass shooting on Oct. 27, 2018, when a gunman opened fire and killed 11 worshippers. The building will house a sanctuary for the Tree of Life congregation — one of three congregations that were meeting at the synagogue at the [...]
In a star-studded Tony Awards night, Jewish winners claimed many of the statues: Shaina Taub won for best book of a musical and best score for her musical “Stuffs.” Alex Edelman won a special Tony for his show, “Just For Us,” in which he chronicles his infiltration into a neo-Nazi meeting. Winners for directing included Danya Taymor, niece of Julie Taymor, for “The Outsiders,” and Daniel Aukin, son of directors David Aukin and Nancy Meekler [...]
The Money Kings, by Daniel Schulman The saga of the German-Jewish immigrants — with now familiar names like Goldman and Sachs, Kuhn and Loeb, Warburg and Schiff, Lehman and Seligman — who influenced the rise of modern finance. These industrious immigrants would soon go from peddling trinkets and buying up shopkeepers’ IOUs to forming what would become some of the largest investment banks in the world. Schulman chronicles their paths to Wall Street dominance, as [...]
In a landmark ruling this month, Israel’s High Court of Justice ruled unanimously that the government must draft ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students into the military, that no longer is there any legal framework to continue the decades-long practice to grant them blanket exemption from army service, The Times of Israel reported. The justices made clear they were not telling the state how many Haredi yeshiva students to draft or how quickly, indicating that the process could [...]
Former Defense Minister Benny Gantz has quit Israel’s three-person war cabinet, repositioning himself as a potential replacement for his longtime rival Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to The Forward. Gantz’s departure from the coalition on Sunday, June 16, along with that of Gadi Eisenkot and another six Knesset members, came one day after an Israeli operation freed four hostages held by Hamas.
Professor Rebecca Kobrin, the Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History at Columbia University, was a special guest at Congregation Tifereth Israel’s Tikkun Leil Shavuot event, held on Tuesday, June 11. Professor Kobrin joined Rabbi Gadi and two other speakers, all of whom connected their remarks to receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai, the focus of the Shavuot observance. Professor Kobrin talked about the protests and violence on the Columbia campus in [...]
David Levy, a Moroccan-born Israeli who rose from ditch digger to Israel’s political heights, often embodying the resentments of Jews of North Africa and Middle Eastern origin, who felt ill-treated by Europe-rooted elites, died on June 2 at a hospital in Jerusalem. He was 86. Mr. Levy was Israel’s foreign minister three times in the 1990s and often its deputy prime minister across two decades. He entered politics, starting in the Israeli labor federation, Histadrut, [...]
Yael Dayan, a celebrated Israeli writer who, after the death of her father, the war hero and statesman Moshe Dayan, entered politics and became a proponent of women’s rights, L.G.B.T.Q. issues, and a two-state solution to the Palestinian conflict, died on May 18 at her home in Tel Aviv. She was 85. Ms. Dayan was the last surviving child of Mr. Dayan, who served as Israel’s defense minister during the Six-Day War in 1967 and [...]
Sigmund Rolat, a Polish Holocaust survivor who tapped the wealth he had accumulated as a businessman in the United States to support cultural projects in his homeland, died on May 19 at his home in Alpine, NJ. He was 93. Notable among his projects is the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews that stands on the grounds of the Warsaw Ghetto. “I want the gate of our museum, and not the ‘Arbeit macht [...]
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