Jewish News

Pastor Terry Jones Cancels Koran Burning, Calls ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ Denial ‘Very Disturbing’

A fiery Florida pastor today called off his bonfire of Korans after claiming he had a deal that would move a controversial mosque away from the site of the 9/11 terror attacks — but the Muslim cleric planning the so-called “Ground Zero mosque” quickly denied to ABC News that he had agreed to move his project.Pastor Terry Jones called the ...

Pastor converts to Judaism and becomes rabbi.

A journey into the foundation of their faith led a California pastor and his wife to a destination they had not anticipated.Yaakov Ephraim Parisi and his wife, Sarah Devorah, began their journey of discovery in the late ’80s, when he was serving as pastor of an evangelical Christian church in California. In 1992 they became pastors of their own church ...

Passover Seder Goes Virtual For A Good Cause

An ages-old tradition has gone high-tech.Virtualseder.com hopes to get people around the Passover table through social media. It allows users to host a Passover dinner for $36 a table.“When they get their name over the table, they can then invite all of their freinds to come and put something on their virtual seder table,” says Robert Socolof of the Virtual Passover Seder ...

Passover in Krakow: Jewish Revival in Poland

Seventy years after most of Polish Jewry died in the Holocaust, it seems that Jewish life in Poland is experiencing a revival.More than 150 people gathered at the Jewish Community Center in Krakow on Monday evening to celebrate the Passover Seder. Among them were non-Jews, mostly Catholic Poles, with a great interest in Judaism. For many of them, it was ...

Passenger: Was cuffed, searched over ‘appearance’

A U.S. woman said Tuesday that she endured nearly four hours in police custody that included being forced off an airplane in handcuffs, strip-searched and interrogated at Detroit’s airport on the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks—all, she believes, because of her Middle Eastern appearance.Shoshana Hebshi, 35, told The Associated Press she was one of three people removed from ...

Parshat Yithro: Up, Down and Onward

The verses immediately preceding the Decalogue Revelation at Sinai are curious, to say the least. God and Moses enter into a dialogue that appears to be a discussion between two deaf individuals, as it were: “The Lord summoned Moses to the mountain peak, and Moses went up. And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Go down and bear testimony to the ...

Parshat Vayetze: Prayers and Patriarchs

Jacob, the last of the patriarchs, is forced by his brother, Esau, to leave his ancestral home for exile.The Talmud (B.T. Brachot 26b) interprets our opening verse as follows: “Jacob enacted the evening prayer, as it is written, ‘And he confronted the place and lodged there;’ the term ‘confrontation’ [Hebrew: pegiya] refers to prayer, as it is written ‘And you ...

Parshat Va’era: Free Choice and Divine Presence

‘Therefore, say to the children of Israel: “I am the Lord, and I shall remove you from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will save you from their labor, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments. And I will take you to Me as a people and I will be a God ...

Parshat Shelah: Further sin

Repentance demands recognition of sin and contrition for past misdeeds; only after atoning ought the individual to proceed with an act of reparation.After the sin of the spies and the failure of the nation to enter the Land of Israel as a result of the ill-advised reconnaissance mission, divine punishment is meted out immediately. But what follows this sin and ...

Parshat Miketz: ‘Greek Wisdom’

Why is there no clear religious prohibition against the study of Greek wisdom and intellectual involvement in philosophy, mathematics, the sciences, secular music, art, literature and theater?Why was no prohibition made against the study of all the expressions of Greek culture which we know as Hellenism? Hanukka does not merely celebrate our military victory over an enemy that wished to ...

Parshat Matot: A plain (brutal) truth

Matot opens with God’s vengeance against Midian, an avowed enemy of the Israelites which had joined Balak, king of Moab, in hiring Balaam to curse Israel. The Midianites also seduced Israelites into having sex with their women and engaging in idolatrous, orgiastic worship of the Midianite gods. Israel was therefore enjoined to make a preemptive strike against a nation which ...

Parshat Lech Lecha: Why God Chose Abraham

Abraham is the first Hebrew, the founder of the Hebrew nation and the path-breaker who created the Hebrew religion. From this portion in the 12th chapter of the Book of Genesis until the last word of the Book of Deuteronomy, it is Abraham’s Israelite descendants who are the major subjects of the Bible.Fascinatingly, God commands Abraham to leave his country, ...