When your ancestors yearned for 19 centuries to return to their homeland of Israel, and you were fortunate enough to be born there but still decide to move to America, it’s natural that somewhere deep inside, you might feel a little guilty.
In the wake of a scandal in which a Washington, D.C. Orthodox rabbi was arrested on Tuesday, Oct. 14, for allegedly spying on women undressing at a mikveh connected to his synagogue, Rabbi Richard A. Flom, a Los Angeles authority on the mikveh [ritual bathhouse] and a member of the Rabbinical Assembly executive committee, said the mikveh at American Jewish University [AJU], a community resource of the Rabbinical Assembly, is secure enough that people who use it for conversion, taharat hamishpacha [family purity] and other reasons, need not worry about someone illicitly watching them while they undress and immerse themselves in the mikveh pool.
Rabbi Barry Freundel, the longtime spiritual leader at Kesher Israel in Washington, D.C., was arrested and charged with voyeurism after the synagogue board alerted the authorities.
After spending three days at the J Street conference in Washington, D.C., and hearing one speaker after another talk about the importance of a two-state solution, I’ve come to the conclusion that Jews are blessed with two attributes…
Larry Greenfield, a Los Angeles-area native, has been named national executive director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs in Washington, D.C., JINSA president David Ganz has announced.
Israeli President Shimon Peres is visiting Washington. Peres will be in Washington next week, the Israeli embassy said in a release Thursday, and arrangements for meetings with \”government leaders\” are underway.
On the 25th anniversary of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, 35 volunteers and 15 Teach For America teachers joined our team in Washington, D.C., to honor the life and legacy of Dr. King through a day of service. Together they created thousands of study materials for hundreds of students in struggling schools across the District of Columbia. The volunteers came together as a diverse group, from big cities and small towns, a range of professions and varying degrees of Jewish connection. But for those five hours on Jan. 17 they were a community united in answering Dr. King’s call to greatness. In fitting testament, each wore a shirt proclaiming that \”Everybody can be GREAT because everybody can SERVE.\”
Palestinian and Israeli leaders will not meet for negotiations although they will be in Washington this weekend, the U.S. State Department said. \”Right now, I’m not anticipating that we would have Israelis and the Palestinians in the same room at this time,\” State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Wednesday. The United States this week abandoned efforts to persuade Israel into extending a moratorium on settlement building as a means of pulling the Palestinians back into direct talks. Crowley\’s remark suggested that the Obama administration for the time being was giving up on direct talks.
David Yahudian endured embarrassment and fear growing up in Teheran. On walks in the market, his father ordered him to tuck the Magen David necklace inside his shirt and — even worse — called him by an alias, Ali, rather than by his overtly Jewish name. Following an Israel-Iran soccer match at the 1974 Asia Games, he saw fans burning Israeli flags in the parking lot.
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