Poland’s prime minister said his government has drafted new regulations that would reduce the suffering of animals during slaughter, including for the needs of religious groups like Jews and Muslims. Poland is covered by European Union laws allowing for ritual slaughter, but the country’s own regulations say that an animal must be stunned before slaughter, including the ritual practice of having its throat slit and bleeding to death.
Terms like capital and value often crop up in economic parlance. But at Sinai Scholars symposium in New York City, these words were endowed with new meaning. A panel discussion held with philanthropist George Rohr made the distinction clear: “As Jews, we have a radically different understanding of what matters. The most important thing you can have is not money, but values.
The Canadian government announced plans to build a national Holocaust memorial in the nation’s capital. The monument will be a testament to the importance of ensuring that the memory of the Holocaust is never lost, Tim Uppal, minister of state for democratic reform, following remarks at the Canadian War Museum, across the street from the designated memorial site. According to the Ottawa Citizen, Canada is the only former Allied nation that does not have a Holocaust memorial.
Women praying at Judaism’s holiest site, the Western Wall, need not fear police threats of arrest if seen wearing traditional ceremonial attire associated with the religion’s males following a Jerusalem District Court ruling handed down. The order, says women may pray with prayer shawls and phylacteries, is seen as a major victory for a group called Women of the Wall, which has been struggling for almost 25-years against police and Orthodox Jewish authorities in charge of the site, for the right to defy traditional restrictions.
Historian Melissa Klapper calls her new book, Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace a project of documentation and restoration.” As you might expect from a member of JWA’s Academic Advisory Council, she sees her study of American Jewish women’s activism in the period 1890-1940. On the one hand, she laments the “general absence of Jewish women from narratives of American women’s history” and argues that accounts of social movements “are incomplete because they have failed to analyze the impact of Jewish women’s presence.
The Jewish Channel’s Steven I. Weiss continued his outstanding investigative reporting with a new story on Rabbi Michael Broyde of Emory University. It now appears certain that Broyde invented letters by two imaginary rabbis to support his opinions on religious matters. Weiss also found that an 83 page article published by Broyde in the journal Tradition was bolstered in part by evidence from Broyde’s manufactured authorities and was published with subventions funded by Emory and the Templeton Foundation.
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