Celebrating Diversity
I was also at a Shiva this week — a member of our community lost his brother, who lived in Israel, after a long illness. Their family is from Iraq, and praying in his...
Category: Religion
Meaningless Ritual
The original founders of the “Jewish Friends of Reform,” in Germany of 1843, invited to join them “all who do not accord any authority or obligatory power to the confused and frequently meaningless rabbinical...
Who Will Live?
Shortly after the end of World War II, a modern-looking young man, sporting a large chup, was brought to the Klausenberger Rebbe zt”l, in one of the displaced persons camps. “I heard that before...
Send Obama a Message
The Obama administration considers Israel a sponsor of terror —at least according to Dick Morris, the disgraced ex-advisor to Bill Clinton, and a host of self-styled “conservative” media. The news was shocking—well, maybe not...
Would’ve Been Nice to be Wrong
Two months ago, I posted about comments made by the departing Head of the IDF Personnel Directorate which were openly hostile to observance. I said that this hostility was one contributing factor to why...
Mayor Abutbol – Say No to Extremism
In September 1998, a two-room school opened up in Tzoran, a residential community of 1,500 young families, nestled among the agricultural settlements east of Netanya, for 25 six and seven-year-olds. When they arrived at...
Beware the Bear Market
“You lost,” my 18-year-old son somberly informed me in shul the other day, and we both laughed. Davening had just ended. I recite Kaddish these days at the end of each service in the...
Passports, Provisos and Photo Captions
When you stop to think about it, the fact that so much of the world’s attention—not to mention so much jealousy, anger and irrationality—has for so many years been so keenly focused on so...
The “O”-Word
The recent suggestion by the rabbi of a West Coast Orthodox congregation that one of the birchos hashachar (morning blessings) recited each day by Torah-observant Jews be eliminated—he sees it as insufficiently enlightened—is a...
A Survivor Speaks Out
by Pinny Taub I reached a point that I cannot sit idly by and watch how the Jewish people are being stepped on, day in and day out, by none other than people who...
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