On Aug. 5, the Birthright Israel alumni organization NEXT launched its 2013 High Holy Days initiative. It features an interactive, nationwide map of services and events — including learning opportunities, dinners and break-the-fasts — as well as a first-time offering of resources and small subsidies for people willing to host Rosh Hashanah meals and Yom Kippur break-the-fasts.
Sitting with his back hunched, his wife by his side and a kippah on his head, a 23-year-old bearded Orthodox man nervously told a gathering of parents at a private residence near Pico-Robertson that a young man named Mendel Tevel had sexually abused him when he was 14.
On the nights when he works an event held at the Orpheum Theatre, Steve Needleman — who owns the venerable theater at Ninth Street and Broadway — says he often is mistaken for a security guard.
As one of the very few reviewers who found fault with Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List,” I once wrote that I would have preferred a film based on “Defiance,” Nechama Tec’s brilliant study of the Bielski partisans, which shows Jews not as the passive beneficiaries of a Nazi factory owner’s largess, but as active resisters who picked up a gun and fought back. And, in 2009, director Edward Zwick came to the same conclusion in his own movie, also titled “Defiance.”
New government regulations are threatening the pedagogical autonomy of Antwerp’s Charedi Orthodox schools and sowing division between hardliners and moderates over whether to bring the community’s school system into conformity with secular educational standards.
Just after midnight yesterday, 26 Palestinian prisoners were released by Israel as part of a confidence-building measure aimed at bolstering renewed Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations.
Seventeen Yemeni Jews were airlifted to Israel in a covert operation. Four of the Jews were flown directly from Yemen to Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport on Wednesday, Haaretz reported. The rest were taken clandestinely from Buenos Aires after being smuggled to the Argentinian capital by a group of Satmar hasidim in August 2011, living in the Satmar community there. The Satmars have been involved in smuggling Jews out of Yemen for several years, according to Haaretz
Dozens of Israeli Arabs protested in front of the Egyptian embassy in Tel Aviv following clashes in Egypt between government security forces and protesters backing deposed President Mohamed Morsi.
Israeli and Palestinian negotiators launched renewed peace talks in Jerusalem under a media blackout.
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