A Jewish Hero at Virginia Tech
Amid the horror of the massacre at Virginia Tech, the story of a hero is being told. One brave professor blocked the door to his second-floor classroom, holding it closed until his students could...
Category: Jewish World
Halachic Child
by Rabbi Harvey Belovski In an attempt to catch the last moments of holiday spirit, my wife and I took our children to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in West London on the...
Jewish Influence
It isn’t likely that very many people exhaled at long last with relief at the news that three entertainment industry executives had compiled their pet list of “America’s 50 most influential rabbis.” But there...
Honesty on Patrilineal Descent
Most would agree that the single most consistent and dangerous flashpoint in the Orthodox-Heterodox divide is the issue of “Who is a Jew.” Much of the animosity and anger that the heterodox feel about...
Who is a plagiarist?
One story that is sure to grip the Orthodox world in coming months is the civil suit for plagiarism brought against best-selling author Naomi Ragen by Michal Tal. Well-known chareidi writer Sarah Shapiro has...
UK Soldiers in Captivity
There’s little time to write during the holiday, of course, but the news of the moment surrounds the British marines and naval personnel captured and then recently released by Iran. The news reports say...
The Magnificence in the Mundane
With the approach of spring, the synagogue Torah-reading segued from accounts of the seminal events of Jewish peoplehood, the exodus from Egypt and the revelation at Sinai – to a series of social laws,...
A Tale of Two Synagogues
While the byline may be mine, both the title and much of the content herein were contributed by Rabbi Dovid Katz, of Beth Abraham Congregation here in Baltimore. His drasha this morning related to...
Small Victory in the Matzah Wars
The battle between fans of hand shmurah and machine continues unabated, having changed very little since the opening rounds in the early nineteenth century. Some people point to the halachic difficulty in incorporating kavanah...
On Shteibels, Internet-Induced Uniformity, and Baltimore
A recent stint as a scholar-in-residence in Baltimore drove home a point that I first learned the hard way decades ago. Shteibelization is not a panacea for unhappy shul-goers. I had not been out...
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