יום שישי, ט״ו אלול תשפ״וFriday, August 28, 2026
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By Aryeh Savir, Tazpit News Agency
When Jews vandalize mosques and monasteries, they are called ”price tag” attacks for government malign neglect of Jewish rights. When anti-Semites attack synagogues, it is not even reported.
By JTA
Two New Jersey men, indicted in March for arson and attempted murder and terrorism, pleaded not guilt in a New Jersey court this week. Anthony Graziano of Lodi and Aakash Dalal of New Brunswick, both 21, were arrested after the northern New Jersey’s Bergen County bombings, one of which injured Beth El Congregation Rabbi Nosson […]
By JTA
The opening of a music club and disco in a 19th century Jewish learning center in Krakow is sparking controversy. The club, called Mezcal, which is also a Mexican alcoholic beverage, opened Saturday night in the former Chewra Thilim Beit Midrash in the heart of Krakow’s Jewish district, Kazimierz. The rundown building, built in 1896, […]
Pamela Geller warns of ‘Islamization’ of North America. Leftists pressured a Great Neck synagogue to ban her. Now Canadian police force Chabad to silence her because her ideas counter “engagement.”
An Moroccan immigrant to the United States who plotted to blow up synagogues in New York City was sentenced on Friday to five years in jail and faces deportation after his release. Mohammed Mamdouh pleaded guilty last year to conspiring to commit terrorism and criminal weapon possession. He was an accomplice to Algerian immigrant Ahmed […]
By JTA
An Algerian immigrant who admitted to planning to blow up synagogues in New York City was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Ahmed Ferhani, 28, was the first person convicted under a state terror statute that went into effect following the 9/11 attacks. He was sentenced last Friday. Ferhani could have been sentenced to up […]
By JTA
Five London rabbis have declared Rabbi Chaim Halpern from Golders Green “not fit” to act as rabbi because of accusations that he had behaved “inappropriately” with women. The five rabbis demanded in a statement published on Thursday that Halpern cease to act as rabbi at his home synagogue in northwest London because of the accusations, […]
Congregation Adas Israel, the last of several orthodox synagogues that once served the Jews of Fall River, Massachusetts – will be handing the keys over to a new group of worshippers – congregants of The Word of Life Community Church.
Parents of students from the Raqia preschool in the Nofei Yam neighborhood in north Tel Aviv have expressed outrage that their children’s school will also serve as a synagogue on Shabbat and holidays.
One of the off the beaten track areas in Eretz Yisrael that I enjoy taking adventurous visitors to are the southern Hevron Hills. As we drive south from Yerushalayim, passing through the very cradle of Jewish history, with its rolling green hills along the Patriarchs and Matriarchs path or the “Road of Heroism" as it is some times called, we resist the magnetic pull to stop at Gush Etzion or Hevron and continue south, fully cognizant that more Jews walked on this path than on any other road in history.
On Friday evening two rockets hit the Gush Etzion area, south of Jerusalem. Residents were on their way to synagogue on Friday night, when the sirens went off. A short time later 2 rockets hit in the Gush Etzion area. No injuries or damage were reported from those strikes.
By JTA
French police reportedly arrested a 21-year-old man suspected of scrawling “death to Jews” on a synagogue near Paris. The man is suspected of writing the message with a black marker on Nov. 7 or Nov. 8 on the entrance to the synagogue of Pantin in Seine-Saint-Denis near Paris, according to the municipality. The radio network […]
According to the RJC, there was an increase by nearly 50% of the number of Jews choosing the Republican candidate to run this country.
By Rhona Lewis
Children should be seen and not heard. It was a maxim that I heard many times throughout my childhood and which caused me a fair amount of frustration. When, I often wondered, would I cross that invisible line and move out of the periphery to which I was assigned, into the arena of adulthood and be given the chance to express an opinion that people would listen to?
By Hadar Sela
The picturesque Nachlaot neighbourhood in Jerusalem started out as what we might call today ‘social housing’. From 1875 onwards benefactors such as Moses Montefiore began building new neighbourhoods outside the walls of the Old City to house the growing Jewish population and relieve some of the overcrowding and squalor of the Jewish Quarter. Thus, Nachlaot is in fact a cluster of fused neighbourhoods, with each one originally having a specific ethnic character and its own synagogue.
By JTA
Norwegian police have increased security around Oslo’s main synagogue after an Islamist extremist threatened to “protect” the Jewish community with an “AK-47 assault rifle and a hunting permit.”
By JTA
A network plotting to kidnap and ransom members of a southern Tunisia town's Jewish community was broken up by the country's national guard, a Tunisian newspaper reported.
I do not question Rabbi Zev Farber’s sincerity. I even applaud his resolve to right what he sees to be wrong in the way we practice Judaism today. But I do not agree with him at all on the way to do it. In a recent article on Morethodoxy, Rabbi Farber suggests that we change the paradigm with respect to a woman’s role in Judaism. His contention is that women are (at best) inadvertently ignored and mistreated vis-à-vis their public religious personae. Their current place in the synagogue is where this is mostly felt.
Police in Israel have reportedly arrested a rabbi suspected of stealing seven Torah scrolls from the synagogue of Moshav Brosh near Be’er Sheva.
On Simchat Torah we celebrate having successfully read the entire Torah over the space of a year.
An Arab-language report claims that Israel is using as cover its work on the new Mughrabi Gate to construct a synagogue.
The oldest Jewish settlements arose in Cape Town, Kimberley, Durban, Port Elizabeth, and Burgersdorp. The settlements in Grahamstown and Graaf Reinet have dissolved. There was a (Jewish) community established in Cape Town, which is the oldest is South Africa, while in Johannesburg, which today houses the largest Jewish settlement in the country, the settlement was first built there in 1887, when about 88 settlers came in from England and Australia to develop the mineral wealth of the land.
By Shiraz Maher
Fears for the future of religious minorities in Egypt were accentuated earlier this month when it was announced that the last synagogue in the country would be closed down. The Eliyahu Hanavi Synagogue, which had operated in Alexandria, was the last functioning center of Jewish life in the country. It is now clear that its cavernous halls, built in the nineteenth century, will not be open to worshippers hoping to mark Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur services this year.
By Orat@Muqata
The ancient synagogue in Meron is located on a hill above the grave of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai. Like other Galilean synagogues from the Byzantine era, its entrance faces south, towards Jerusalem. But what makes this synagogue special is a story from its later history.
Spray painted symbols of swastikas were found on road signs in the Monmouth Heights neighborhood.
For the first time in 2,000 years, there will be no Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur services at the Eliyahu Hanavi Synagogue in Alexandria in 5773, reports Daniel Greenfield in "In The Point." This was the last active synagogue in Egypt. The Egyptian authorities' excuse for the shut-down, effectively outlawing High Holiday services in the […]
By JTA
Two Torah scrolls, one complete and one incomplete, were found in Poland's Sokolow Podlaski district. The Torah scrolls found Aug. 20 are believed to have belonged to a synagogue in nearby Wegrow. A local policeman brought the scrolls to the municipal offices in Sokolow and gave them to Marcin Pasik, Sokolow Commune Head. "The policeman […]
By Moshe Herman
Yishai and Malkah talk about a flight of new Olim from North America along with recent happenings in the life of the Fleishers and end by talking about the importance of Elul in the Jewish calendar.
On Saturday night, Tisha B'Av 5772, some 50 men, women and children, members of the settlement nucleus of Yad Yair, together with the Benjamin Settlers Committee and residents of Gush Talmonim, mourned the destruction of Jerusalem, and shared their private grief over the destruction of their settlement more than three years ago by the Civil Administration of Judea and Samaria.
By JTA
Muammar Gadhafi's mother was Jewish, the late Libyan leader's chief of protocol Nuri al-Samara told Al-Hayat. Last year, a 76-year-old Jewish resident of Netanya told Maariv that Gadhafi was her cousin. "My grandmother converted to Islam but never forgot her roots," Gita Boaron told Maariv at the time. "She would come to visit us, give […]
By JTA
A Philadelphia-area Reform temple will feature a Republican speaker to balance an appearance by U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee. Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) is set to speak Monday at the Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel in Elkins Park, Pa., on behalf of President Obama. The synagogue's senior rabbi, Lance Sussman, […]
A monumental synagogue building dating to the Late Roman period (ca. 4th-5th centuries C.E.) has been uncovered in archaeological excavations at the ancient Jewish village of Huqoq in Israel's Galilee.
Nobel Prize winner author Günter Grass was asked not to visit the synagogue in Gdansk, his birthplace.
The Baal Shem Tov was the founder and the visionary of chassidus, but the architect who built and spread the movement was Rabbi Dov Ber, the maggid of Mezeritch.
If you ask someone coming out of church on a Sunday, "Do you believe in G-d?" the worshipper will be shocked. "What type of question is that? Of course I do!"
By Bette Cyznek
Huge crystal chandeliers sparkled with points of light that shone like diamonds. Hundreds of ornate, gilded chairs had been arranged on the ballroom’s thick, blue and brown carpet in the palatial Miami Beach hotel. This elegant space had been converted into a temporary synagogue for the holiday.
By Tzvi Fishman
“The non-observant Jew knows. Deep in his heart he knows. He knows that the path [he treads] is a false one, that the Judaism he professes is a mockery.... His moment of truth lies within him. His is the power to call it into being. Let him but dig deeply into his Jewish resources and draw from them the traditional Jewish qualities of courage, determination and sacrifice."
By Tzvi Fishman
Avraham Avinu packed up his belongings without saying a word and hastened to the Land, even though it was loaded with savage heathens, prostitutes, idol worship, murderers, and rapists, even though there wasn’t one synagogue, kosher butcher, or luxury villa to be found.
The comparatively small Jewish population of India – after the census of 1921 there were hardly 20,000 out of a general population of 352 million – fell into four groups: the Cochin Jews of the Malabar Coast, the Bene Israel, the fore-Asian Jews, mostly of Sephardic ancestry, and immigrants from various regions of Europe.
The annual Jewish Lag B’Omer pilgrimage to the oldest synagogue in Africa should be maintained as a symbol of Tunisian openness, according to Tunisia’s tourism minister on Tuesday, yet the increase in fundamentalist Salafi Islamic political rule threatens to drive out the remaining Jews of Djerba.
By JTA
Aharon Alexander Gorshonov, 25, the Jewish man who was attacked after he had left a seder at a synagogue in Kiev, will be flown to Israel for treatment. Gorshonov was found on Sunday night in an area near the synagogue where attacks by neo-Nazi groups have occurred in the past, nearly a full day after […]
By JTA
A Jewish man was attacked after he left a seder at a synagogue in Kiev. The man, 25, was found on Sunday night, nearly a full day after the attack, with serious head injuries believed to have been inflicted by glass bottles. He is in critical condition in a Kiev hospital. He also had bruises […]
Libya lies in North Africa between Egypt and Tunisia and consists of Cyrenica and Tripoli. Even in the 3rd century before the Common Era, Cyrenica was a destination for Jewish emigration. Over the next century the Jewish population grew in numbers but was strongly Hellenized.
The stories in this column are translations by Mr. Nollet from Die Juden In Der Welt (The Jews in the World) by Mark Wischnitzer, a long out-of-print book published more than seven decades ago in Germany. The book examines Jewish communities, one country at a time, as they existed in 1935.
The excavation of archeological layers has shown that in Roman times there were Jewish communities in Syracuse, Catania, Noto, among other places. At the end of the 6th century there is mention of Jews in Messina, Palermo, and Girgenti.
It’s not often that I get to speak to a rabbi about to celebrate his 99th birthday.
By JTA
Heightened caution comes after a month of increasingly worrisome attacks against synagogues in Bergen County, an affluent part of New York City’s suburbs with a sizable Jewish population.
In response to community objections, a prominent Brooklyn synagogue will not proceed, for the moment, with the construction of a 65-foot annex to its main building, according to several members of the Syrian Orthodox community in Brooklyn who asked not to be named. However, they will most probably not permanently shelve the project altogether.
August 28, 2026 
