According to an article in the July 13 New York Times, Hungarian Holocaust survivors are trying to sue entities in the country for losses suffered during the Holocaust, citing the following account that had occurred at the time: Iren Gitta Kellner was a teenager when her parents, eight siblings and hundreds of other Jews in their Hungarian town were ordered to the train station with suitcases and crammed into cattle cars by national railway workers [...]

Growing up, we had a rule of thumb about yarmulkes: The closer yours was to your forehead, the more strictly religious you were. The frum bochurim placed theirs practically on their noses; the boys from Conservative families bobby-pinned their kippahs on the back of their heads. The cool kids, of course, stuffed theirs in their pockets. The Jewish skullcap, in other words, was a signifier of much more than the religious precept it embodied. Over the years, [...]

New York City’s annual Israel Day Parade marched up Fifth Avenue on Sunday, May 31, with tens of thousands of people turning out for what organizers called one of the  largest parades in the event’s history, a public show of Jewish solidarity when anti-semitism is rising around the world. Gov. Kathy Hochul, Sen. Chuck Schumer, Attorney General Letitia James, former mayors Eric Adams and Michael Bloomberg, and a long list of officials marched to underscore [...]

The painting shows a girl in a bonnet and her younger brother staring across the Normandy coast toward an unknown horizon. The artwork was acquired in Paris for Adolf Hitler, one of countless works swept up in the Nazi plunder. In May, the piece went on permanent display in a new room at the city’s Musée d’Orsay as part of France’s reckoning with Nazi-era looting. The gallery is given over to the orphaned masterpieces of [...]

On an unseasonably warm Friday evening, 40 people gathered for a Kabbalat Shabbat service in a grove of redwoods and California live oaks. A group of musicians led the congregation in singing Hebrew tunes as an owl made his presence known from above. The service was part of Makom Shalom, a forest shul that launched during the High Holidays last year and has grown to 83 adult members. Rabbi Zelig Golden leads the nondenominational congregation in [...]

Jeffrey Salkin/For ‘Religion News Service’ One of my adult students recently asked me, “You know how God spoke to Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, Moses, Isaiah, and the rest of the prophets? Why doesn’t God speak anymore?” It is a truly good question. A quick answer: After Malachi, there was no more prophecy, and God stopped speaking. But the Talmud has a different answer: Even though Prophecy had ended by that time, the voice of [...]

Jewish Cemetery Preserved by Christians and Jews Newport, Rhode Island, had once been home to a thriving  Colonial Jewish community — also the home of Touro Synagogue, the nation’s oldest surviving Jewish house of worship. But after the Revolutionary War and the city’s economic decline, that community largely faded. Yet the cemetery and the synagogue building remained.             The Jewish burial ground dated to 1677. In 1822, Abraham Touro left money for the upkeep of [...]

Dinah Slepovitch. Photo by Zisl Slepovitch By Jennifer A. Stern In summer 2020, when the world was in lockdown, I couldn’t stop watching a video that featured two young children — Dinah Slepovitch and Pinya Minkin — singing a Yiddish folk song about eating potatoes every day. The song felt a lot like life during COVID-19, even as it evoked what poor Eastern European Jews often ate in the past. I was enchanted. The Yiddish language was still relatively new [...]

The corridors of Limerick’s Istabraq Hall rang out with the sounds of Hebrew prayer on a recent Shabbat to celebrate the gift of four Torah scrolls, which will serve the Irish Jewish communities outside of Dublin. The scrolls, gifted by Congregation Temple Emanu-El in Haverhill, MA, have their own extensive history: three were scribed in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust, and the fourth in Israel in the 1950s. The Temple is merging with another congregation, [...]