Online material helps prepare those in isolation for the High Holidays As the coronavirus pandemic forces individuals worldwide to remain isolated, and with many synagogues under orders to restrict attendance, millions of Jews will be praying at home for the High Holidays, many for the first time in their adult lives. To assist them, Chabad.org […]

On the 30th anniversary of the riots, how Crown Heights survived to remain a thriving Jewish neighborhood The Crown Heights Riot took place 30 years ago this month. The event, three days of unrestrained anti-Semitic violence, resulted in the stabbing murder of one Jew, Yankel Rosenbaum, the death by suicide of an elderly Holocaust survivor, […]

The first mitzvah campaign to bring Judaism to the individual, wherever he or she was For as long as anyone can remember, the symbol of the High Holidays has been the shofar, the ancient curved instrument used to inaugurate the Jewish New Year. The shofar, most often hewn out of a ram’s horn—although it can […]

Remembering Norman Rosenbaum Thirty years ago, on Aug. 19, 1991, a tragic car accident in Brooklyn, N.Y., sparked what has been called “the most serious anti-Semitic incident in American history.” For four days the Jewish community of the borough’s Crown Heights neighborhood sat in terror, as rioters rampaged through the streets and desperate calls for […]

Eighty public school students find friendship and personal connection to Judaism on a whirlwind summer trip to Israel The energy was building in the terminals of New York’s John F. Kennedy International airport. Alone and in small groups, teens from distant posts around the U.S. trickled in. For many, this was to be their first […]

How humor can make room for a deeper truth otherwise concealed by the apparitions of this world In his 1905 philosophical analysis of humor, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Sigmund Freud cites a classic Jewish joke: “Two Jews met in a railway carriage at a station in Galicia. ‘Where are you going?’ asked […]

With Covid safety top of mind, many helped during pandemic say they have found a new Jewish home While still in the midst of a year-and-a-half of assistance that has continued unabated through Covid-19 lockdowns, panic-induced scarcity, health challenges and the ongoing need to comfort the loved ones of those who have passed, Chabad centers […]

Istanbul’s Rabbi Mendy Chitrik tweets his three-week trek across centuries of Jewish life Sometime between the first and second centuries, a discussion was brewing in ancient Israel among the rabbis of the Mishnah. The burden of history and future lay on their shoulders; millennia of Jewish tradition would be based on their word. On this […]