Torah Prep School of St. Louis recently underwent a $2.5 million renovation of its girls division school in University City. The Orthodox school, which instructs students from preschool through eighth grade, now features a new roof, as well as new heating...
NEW YORK (JTA) – Here’s a riddle: If a transgender Jew shows up at an Orthodox synagogue, on which side of the mechitzah barrier separating the sexes should the person be seated?That’s an easy one compared to more complex Jewish legal questions...
what she was learning. “The Talmud, for someone who has a diverse range of interests, is the most incredible text because it has everything in it,” Kurshan told JTA. “There’s nothing as exciting as the next page of Gemarah because it’s so discursive....
LONDON — For Leslie Lyndon and the London Jewish community, it was a minor miracle.When Lyndon carried the Olympic torch through a north London neighborhood last week, it was more than representative of how Jewish Londoners have embraced the Olympic...
WASHINGTON — Nathan Diament learned two things 22 years ago while watching Barack Obama play pickup basketball at the Harvard Law School gym.“He was a generous passer,” he said of the school’s Law Review editor and the future U.S. president. “He...
WASHINGTON — The latest battle over religious pluralism in Israel has unleashed a new barrage of criticism and calls for reform aimed at the Orthodox-controlled Israeli Chief Rabbinate. Unlike major flare-ups in past decades, however, this time it’s...
Should religious institutions adapt to changing times or ought they insist on conformance to their traditional practices? It’s a tug of war that has been repeated throughout the ages, with the rope being pulled aggressively to one side or the other....
WASHINGTON -- President Obama is spreading the word, one Jewish constituency at a time: He has Israel's back. Obama defended his record on Israel and on religious freedoms on Tuesday during a White House meeting with Orthodox leaders. Challenged by one...
JERUSALEM — After a Jerusalem-area’s religious council allowed a female Reform rabbi to participate in its proceedings, some advocates of liberal Judaism in the country are hailing their inroads into the Orthodox-dominated religious infrastructure....
BY ELAINE K. ALEXANDER, SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH LIGHT
• May 16, 2012
“Cutting-edge plus cutting edge.” That’s how Dr. Ethan Schuman describes a new initiative for nine local men to learn — via Skype, an online videoconference program — how to slaughter livestock according to kashrut, Jewish dietary law. The...
United we run In a groundbreaking collaboration, pre-teen girls in the local Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Jewish communities joined together this spring to participate in Girls on the Run, the nonprofit after-school program that seeks to inspire...
With the recent news that the publishers of Encyclopedia Britannica would stop producing hardbound, paper copies of their venerable reference, yet another nail was hammered in the coffin of the 20th century.For those of a certain age, or of sentimental...
