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Cnaan Liphshiz, JTA

Rabbi Shmuel Notik holding a Nile perch at his home in Nairobi in 2015.

Chabad meets needs of growing community in sub-Saharan Africa

NAIROBI — Rabbi Shmuel Notik was on his way to blow the shofar on a Friday evening in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi when six men armed with knives intercepted...

Luc Descheemaeker, left, receiving an award from Belgium's Queen Paola, in pink, in 2002 for his children's puppet theater play based on Art Spiegelman's cartoon memoir 'Maus.' (Courtesy of Sint-Jozefs Institute)

First-person account: Being Jewish in Belgium

AMSTERDAM — I used to think I had a pretty good understanding of what it means to be Jewish in Belgium. A longtime observer of that polarized binational country, whose...

Rabbis Yechiel Eckstein, left, and Moshe Sebbag at the Grand Synagogue of Paris, June 27, 2016. (Cnaan Liphshiz)

Mixed feelings on Eckstein’s International Fellowship of Christians and Jews

PARIS — The summer drizzle that soaked the French capital did little to dampen Yechiel Eckstein’s enthusiasm as he arrived recently with his wife Joelle at the...

A French flag flies at half mast at an empty beach on the Promenade des Anglais on July 15, 2016 in Nice, France. (David Ramos/Getty)

Terror no surprise to Nice’s Jews

AMSTERDAM — To the millions of tourists who visit Nice annually, the city in southeast France is an ultimate holiday destination that offers inviting beaches and...

Daniel Gurevich holds the bottle of wine he won for catching a Pokemon at the Grand Choral Synagogue of St. Petersburg.

In Russia, Pokémon Go leads people to shul

MOSCOW — As the Pokémon Go phenomenon grows, some institutions connected to European Jewry’s darkest hour have taken precautions against it. The Auschwitz-Birkenau...

Flowers and wreaths left at the memorial to the massacre at Jebwabne, July 10, 2016.

Seventy-five years since massacre at Jedwabne

JEDWABNE, Poland — As German army troops invaded eastern Poland, Ichak Lewin’s family fled their town of Wizna. On July 10, 1941, the Lewins approached the nearby...

Yomi Peretz, right, approaching a line of tourists waiting to place their orders at L'As Du Fallafel in the historic Jewish quarter of Paris, April 2012. (WikiMedia Commons)

Falafel war in Paris

PARIS — On a crowded sidewalk in the French capital, Yomi Peretz exchanges jokes and backslaps with customers waiting in a long line in the rain to enter his falafel...

Jeremy Corbyn (Dan Kitwood/Getty)

Corbyn’s bluster infuriates Jews

LONDON —— Even before he was kicked out of Britain’’s Labour Party for saying that Israel runs the Islamic State, Bob Campbell was a marginal figure within...

My quesy night at a ‘Jewish’ eatery

LVIV, Ukraine — There’s a Jewish-themed restaurant attached to the ruins of the 16th-century Golden Rose Synagogue here. It first caught my eye last month when I was...

More fallout from Brussels

ANTWERP — The hundreds of rifle-toting police and soldiers who patrol Isaac Michaeli’s neighborhood have done little to improve his sense of safety. “When the right...