The largest city in Africa will get its first full-time rabbi when Rabbi Mendy Sternbach and his wife, Mazal, arrive in the coastal city of Lagos, Nigeria, a city of 17.5 million and the continent’s fourth largest economy. The Sternbachs will open their own Chabad House to serve about 450 Jewish residents.

Jonathan Pollard, a former intelligence analyst, who served three decades in prison for spying for and giving classified information to Israel, has been freed. Pollard, a Jewish American, had been convicted for violations of the Espionage Act.

The U.S. Parole Commission issued a certificate terminating parole and lifting all parole restrictions, according to a statement by Pollard’s lawyers, Eliot Lauer and Jacques Semmelman.

Pollard’s conditions under the Parole Commission since being released in 2015, included remaining in New York City for at least five years unless granted permission to travel outside, having his computer use monitored by the U.S. government, and wearing a wrist monitor.

With his newfound freedom, Pollard will now be able to achieve his lifelong dream of moving to Israel, where he has citizenship.

Harvey J. Alter, along with Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice, received the 2020 Nobel Prize for medicine for discovery of the hepatitis C virus.

“For the first time in history, the disease can now be cured, raising hopes of eradicating hepatitis C virus from the world population,” said the Nobel committee in a statement. They announced the prize at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

Alter, 85, is an intramural researcher at the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Two American economists have won the Nobel Prize for improving the theory of how auctions work, and inventing new and better auction formats now woven into many parts of the economy.

The discoveries of Jewish economist Paul R. Milgrom and his collaborator, Robert B. Wilson, “have benefitted sellers, buyers and taxpayers around the world,” the Nobel Committee said, noting that the auction formats developed by the winners have been used to sell radio frequencies, fishing quotas and airport landing slots.

Both economists are based at Stanford University in California.

American poet Louise Glück became the 16th woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, the fourth Jewish woman to win the prize, following Nelly Sachs (1966), Nadine Gordimer (1991) and Elfriede Jelinek (2004), and the first American Jewish woman to win. The prize has been awarded since 1901.

In a 2012 review of Glück’s collected poems, New Yorker critic Dan Chiasson wrote that “Outside her poems, much noisy history has occurred this past half century. Inside them, you find, X-rayed by an unusually analytic mind, only the kinds of things that Emerson once said a poet needed: ‘Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions.’”

The New Yorker has suspended staff writer Jeffrey Toobin for inappropriate behavior during a Zoom call last week with employees of the magazine and WNYC radio. According to a report in The New York Times, during a pause in the call for breakout discussions, Mr. Toobin switched to a second call of a sexual nature, according to two people familiar with the call.

Asked about reports, Mr. Toobin said in a statement, “I made an embarrassingly stupid mistake, believing I was off-camera. I apologize to my wife, family, friends and co-workers.”

A spokeswoman for The New Yorker, where Mr. Toobin has worked for more than 25 years, said in a statement, “Mr. Toobin has been suspended while we investigate the matter.” Mr. Toobin is also a senior legal analyst for CNN. The network said in a statement that Mr. Toobin, who has worked for CNN since 2002, “has asked for some time off while he deals with a personal issue, which we have granted.”

Careful readers of The Shofar might think that the editors have erred by running an announcement of shul member Adrianne Greenberg’s golf championship a second time. Not so. Indeed Adrianne did win the Women’s Flight A Golf Championship in a nail-biting finish at Island’s End Golf Club, as reported in the September issue of The Shofar.  But Adrianne makes the top of the Jews in the News leader board again this month by winning the Women’s Flight B Championship at the Pine hills Golf Course, barely a breath from her first win.

This time, the format was stroke play, where the winner is determined by the fewest number of strokes after two 18-hole rounds. It was another nail-biter for Adrianne, who “squeaked out a victory,” she said, by a single stroke. Not only did she win it, she won it on her birthday. Nice present, and a fantastic finish to an extraordinary year in golf.