JERUSALEM (JTA) — In an unscheduled visit to Gaza, the foreign minister of Germany said Israel must ease its blockade on Gaza, but that it will happen only when Israel is certain that rocket fire from the coastal strip has stopped. “We need local...

(JTA) — A British human rights commission said it is illegal for a school to prevent children from attending if their mothers drive. In a statement, the Equality and Human Rights Commission said that “this sort of discrimination has no place in our...

(JTA) — Central Synagogue, a Reform congregation in New York with 2,300 families as members, reportedly will be closed for five days to fumigate for bedbugs. The possible infestation was first reported Saturday by the New York Post, citing a letter...

JERUSALEM (JTA) — The head of the Palestine Football Association came under fire for withdrawing a request to suspend Israel from FIFA, the international soccer body. Jibril Rajoub said prior to Friday’s proposed vote that Chancellor Angela Merkel...

(JTA) — The 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics won by American experimental physicist Leon Lederman sold at auction for $765,002. The online auction conducted by Los Angeles-based Nate D. Sanders Auctions closed on Sunday evening. Lederman, 92, and his wife,...

(JTA) — The United States Social Security Administration paid out some $20.2 million in retirement benefits to suspected Nazi war criminals and other Nazi collaborators. A report prepared by the Social Security Administration’s inspector general,...

ISTANBUL (JTA) – For centuries, Turkey served as a safe haven for Jews fleeing anti-Semitism. The earliest records of Jews in Turkey date back to 220 B.C.E., but the area saw a major Jewish influx in the early 14th century, when Jews expelled from...

(JTA) —A British Jewish woman won $25,000 in damages from a company that refused to hire her because she is Shabbat observant. Aurelie Fhima applied to Travel Jigsaw in Manchester, but was rejected after she said at a job interview that her religious...

(JTA) — The Washington Supreme Court reversed a ruling that protected the Olympia Food Co-op from lawsuits over its boycott of Israeli products. The ruling Thursday, reached through a vote of 9-0 justices, voids a 2012 ruling by the Thurston County...

(JTA) — American actor Al Pacino decided not to appear in a play because of the playwright’s support for Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. Pacino pulled out last week from a stage adaptation of “Hunger,” by Norwegian author Knut Hamsun, The Telegraph reported....

(JTA) — Many of the remaining 500,000 Holocaust survivors around the world live in poverty and need assistance, an international conference was told. Representatives of 39 countries participating in the two-day “Living in Dignity” conference that...

Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, rabbi of the Jewish settlement of Efrat conducts the Pidyon HaBen ceremony for a 30-day-old first born son in Efrat, West Bank, on May 25, 2015. (Gershon Elinson/Flash90) TEL AVIV (JTA) — There’s no shortage of Israelis who want...