Jackie Hajdenberg, JTA

Opening a kosher restaurant in New York City wasn’t always in the cards for Raif Rashed, a Druze from the village of Usfiya in northern Israel. But as Rashed, the owner of Taboonia — a new Druze restaurant in the Garment District that is seeking kosher certification — will tell you, sometimes life can take an unexpected turn, especially after a tragedy.

An American Jew, Benjamin Reuben Zalman-Polun, is facing the death penalty for his involvement in an attempted political coup in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in late May.

When she was 14 years old, Elke Bentley could hear her father’s online Talmud classes through the wall between her bedroom and his home office in Brookline, Massachusetts. The 5 a.m. start time for the daily Talmud learning her father had begun attending during the COVID-19 pandemic didn’t stop Elke from pulling her chair up to the wall and marking up in pencil her own copy of the Talmud, listening along to the class.

Last month, a group of 10 Jewish Boy Scouts hiked more than 100 miles in New Mexico, but the trek wasn’t the most intense part of the trip. That came on the plane ride home, when two of the scouts and their staff saved a man’s life.

On Shabbat, Shlomo Tannor often encounters a problem common to regular synagogue-goers: He’ll hear a tune that sounds familiar but he can’t place it. When Shabbat is over, he’ll have no way to look it up. Frequently, those tunes come from one source: Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, the most prominent composer of Jewish religious music in the postwar era.