News
A CONTROVERSY over genocide commemoration at the University of Denver last week left Jewish students angry over “cultural insensitivity,” while encouraging them to seek dialogue between students with different or conflicting views about how such commemorations, and other campus activism, should be handled.
On Sunday, April 7, Jewish and non-Jewish students belonging to a campus organization called Never Again! put up a display to mark Holocaust and Genocide Awareness Week on DU’s Driscoll Green.
The display, a “Field of Flags,” composed of hundreds of multi-colored flags to mark the different categories of all 12 million Holocaust victims, was timed to coincide with Yom Hashoah, the official day of Holocaust commemoration.
BERLIN — German Chancellor Angela Merkel will receive a top award from Europe’s mainstream Orthodox rabbinic body.
The Conference of European Rabbis announced this week that Merkel will be awarded the 2013 Lord Jakobovits Prize for European Jewry for her dedication to the German Jewish community and “outspoken denunciation of anti-Semitism throughout Europe.”
The award will be presented in May at the Great Synagogue of Europe in Brussels; for security reasons the exact date has not bee...
NEW YORK — Former President Jimmy Carter accepted an award from the Yeshiva University law school’s journal, despite protests from pro-Israel supporters.
On April 10, the Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution at a ceremony in New York bestowed its International Advocate for Peace prize on Carter for his political activism.
“[The event was] totally peaceful, totally nonviolent, totally friendly,” Brian Farkas, the journal’s editor, told The New York Times. “People were laughing, pe...
JERUSALEM — Natan Sharansky said the implementation of his plan to expand the non-Orthodox prayer site at the Western Wall could begin in as little as one month.
In an interview on April 11 with JTA, Sharansky sounded cautiously optimistic about his proposal to create an egalitarian space equal in size to the current men’s and women’s sections combined.
The Jewish Agency for Israel chairman was charged last year with finding a solution to mounting tensions over women’s prayer at the We...
PARIS — Meyer Habib, a religious Sephardic Jew of Tunisian ancestry and a self-made businessman, fits well with the dominant profile of French Jewry: Like 70% of French Jews, he is of North African origin.
As the demography of French Jewry has changed over the past few decades to majority Sephardic, so have the community’s institutions. The Consistoire, which administers religious services, and the FSJU, which provides social services, both have been taken over by Sephardic stewardship.
Bu...