One of the country’s most prominent ultra-Orthodox rabbis has condemned vaccines as a “hoax” in an interview with a local Jewish newspaper. “I see vaccinations as the problem,” Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetzky told the Baltimore Jewish Times in a story published in late August. “It’s a hoax. Even the Salk [polio] vaccine is a hoax. It’s…
The largest donor to the ultra-Orthodox umbrella organization Agudath Israel of America is a Christian family from Arkansas. The Agudah, as the organization is known, represents some of the most stringent, black-hat-wearing Orthodox Jews in the United States. Its backers include wealthy Jewish developers and health care magnates. The organization, however, has received more money…
A New Jersey judge has ruled that a Jewish gay “conversion” group could be liable for the costs of reversing the damage it caused four young men while trying to curb their same-sex attraction. New Jersey Superior Court Judge Peter F. Bariso, Jr. ruled that Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH) and its co-defendants…
What do some devout Christians say about gays and lesbians? Love the sinner, hate the sin. Love the person even if you believe that at the very core of his or her identity is something so intrinsically wrong, it puts that gay man or woman in a separate, scornful category of being. To the modern…
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio claimed he didn’t hear a rabbi’s shocking rant about Open Orthodoxy and non-Orthodox Jews, despite sitting just a few feet away. De Blasio got testy when reporters queried why he sat silent through the Agudath Israel gala speech of Rabbi Yaakov Perlow in which he denounced the more progressive…
Courtesy of Agudath Israel As I concluded a yearlong course that I have been teaching at a local day school, a student approached me with a concerned look on his face. “What if I don’t know what my Jewish identity is?” I pushed him to say more. “Well, my parents had the Holocaust, but —…
Officials at Agudath Israel defended remarks by the organization’s leading rabbi, Yaakov Perlow, in which he called the religiously progressive Open Orthodox movement heretical, and criticized non-Orthodox Judaism. “This kind of stuff has been part and parcel of what our movement has been speaking about since time immemorial,” said Rabbi David Zweibel, Agudath Israel’s executive…
Rabbi Yaakov Perlow speaks at the Agudath Isael annual gala / YouTube On Wednesday we learned that, while speaking at a fundraising gala for the ultra-Orthodox Agudath Israel of America, Rabbi Yaakov Perlow, head of that organization, slandered virtually every Jew on the planet, down to and including a bunch of plain-old-Orthodox folks. We were…
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