About a year ago, Mike Weinhaus was on the phone with a representative from his insurance company when the person asked, “Are you the family that was on the news with COVID?” Weinhaus, a member of Congregation Shaare Emeth, was indeed part of the...

"As a rabbi who works as a chaplain at a hospital in Indianapolis, I’ve held my tongue a lot when it comes to COVID-19 and the emotional strain it puts on the medical staff. But now — as my team at Indiana University Health is responsible for pastoral...

It’s hard to believe we never heard of Omicron until a week ago. It was November 26 when the World Health Organization (WHO) designated the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus variant B.1.1.529 a “variant of concern” and named it Omicron after the 15th letter...

A third (booster) dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine against Covid-19 is 93 percent effective in protecting individuals against severe Covid-19-related outcomes, compared with two doses received at least five months earlier. This conclusion is based...

Even with Israel’s world-leading rollout of Covid-19 vaccinations, drugs to treat Covid patients are in desperate need across the world. Two such drugs developed in Israel show great promise in clinical trials: EXO-CD24 and Allocetra. EXO-CD24,...

Last summer and fall, as the general election approached, citizens across the country voiced concern about the prospect of voting in person. With COVID -19 spreading, many jurisdictions saw a need, even if only temporarily, to expand absentee and mail-in...

Normally at this time of year, back-to-school angst begins to arrive, usually in the minds of students who are hardly eager for summer vacation to end.But nothing is normal in the time of the coronavirus pandemic. This year, the anxiety typically felt...

A couple of weeks ago, I joined a Zoom call with parents at Saul Mirowitz Jewish Community School, which is hoping to be able to resume in-person classes this fall even though the pandemic is far from over. While most schools in St. Louis County aren’t...

(JTA) — Tamara Boronina, an 82-year-old Holocaust survivor living in Ukraine, can barely afford her small Odessa apartment on her monthly pension of $65.She is a widow whose only daughter died in 1999. Unable to visit the local Jewish community center...

Ask Jewish summer camp directors about the hardest part of designing a virtual camp experience for the COVID-19 era and they’ll laugh.Then they’ll say that all of it is hard. That they’ve never done anything like this before. That camp on a screen...

DENVER — In the summer of 1999, we slept head to head in top bunks at Camp Ramah in Canada. We also shared a viral upper respiratory illness that kept us from participating in the much-anticipated yom bli shemesh (a day without sun) while the rest of...