A California appeals court has affirmed a lower court’s ruling denying a claim from Chabad of California Inc. of an $18-million pledge the local Jewish nonprofit group said was promised to it by philanthropist Roland Arnall. Chabad said Arnall promised to donate the money before his death in 2008.
During the course of one month in 1941, most of the thousands of Jewish residents of Utena, Lithuania, were rounded up by the Nazis, taken into the forest and murdered. Only a few dozen managed to escape. That episode nearly buried the entire history of the centuries-old town, but through the efforts of the nonprofit MACEVA and volunteers like students at Abraham Joshua Heschel Day School in Northridge, this history is finally being unearthed. On Jan. 23, the entire eighth-grade class at Heschel filled the gym to translate the Hebrew inscribed on recently uncovered gravestones from Utena.
To say that Rabbi Deborah R. Prinz likes chocolate would be a gross — or rather, delicious — understatement. For seven years, she’s traveled around the world and written about the delicacy, culminating in October with the publication of “On the Chocolate Trail: A Delicious Adventure Connecting Jews, Religions, History, Travel, Rituals and Recipes to the Magic of Cacao.”
Hezbollah denied it was involved in a terrorist attack in Bulgaria that killed six, including five Israelis.
From generation to generation, starting in 1950 and continuing today, one of the most important sites on the map of the Jewish community in Southern California was a stretch of rolling hills in Simi Valley. The story is richly told in the pages of “The Brandeis-Bardin Institute: A Living History” by Jenna Leventhal (American Jewish University, $30), an “official” history. Published by the university that now owns the property, it is predictably upbeat but also, at moments, candid and forthright about the birth pangs and growing pains of a Jewish institution.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.