More in ‘halacha’

A three-year-old Israeli girl was strangled to death by her father earlier this year, and the nation was shocked—by the luridness of the crime, by the father’s subsequent suicide attempts, by the divorce-gone-bad story it emerged was behind the crime, and, not least, by the fuel the child’s mother poured on an ongoing battle between ...

• Turkey postponed a military drill in order to bar Israel from participating, which caused the United States to back out. [AP]
• And prompted Israel’s defense minister Ehud Barak to warn against “criticizing” Turkey, which has been a friend to Israel, although relations have deteriorated since the Gaza War. [Haaretz]
• A program in Israel that ...

In the labyrinthine realm of halacha, Jewish religious law, a new question has arisen: is trudging up and down 17 flights of stairs farther from the definition of “work” prohibited on the Sabbath than entering and exiting an elevator that moves automatically up and down floors?
According to the Jerusalem Post, a “Shabbat elevator”—which is just ...

For years, Andreas Christoph Wankum was the Hamburg, Germany, Jewish community’s favorite son. A self-made millionaire who made his fortune in real estate, he signed fat checks to Keren Hayesod, the influential pro-Israel charity. When Communism collapsed in Hungary, he was instrumental in helping many of that country’s Jews make aliya. He funded scores of ...

It is, in truth, an excellent question, when you stop to think about it. If a blind man “sees” what people look like by touching their faces, how is a blind Orthodox man—prohibited from touching a woman who is not his wife—to see what a potential wife looks like? Thankfully, Rabbi Yuval Sherlo, head of ...

Anyone who knows anything about how synagogues work—especially small synagogues—won’t be surprised to hear there was a big debate at last night’s annual meeting of the First Narayever Congregation, an unaffiliated traditional-egalitarian synagogue in Toronto, about whether to shell out for the installation of a regular elevator to replace the rickety contraption that currently ferries ...