1) 82,270 Jews live in Michigan. 2) Michigan’s first Jewish settler was Ezekiel Solomon. A fur trader, he operated a general store during the Revolutionary War. 3) Montreal-born fur trader Chapman Abraham was Detroit’s first Jewish settler, arriving there in 1762. 4) Founded in 1885 in Traverse City, Congregation Beth El is Michigan’s oldest synagogue….
Hundreds showed up at the Jewish community center in the Detroit suburb of Oak Park in an effort to save the building. Some 800 people, the maximum number allowed in the JCC building, showed up at a discussion Monday night to protest the center’s closing, the Detroit Free Press reported. Leaders of the center and…
(JTA) — Amid persistent budget deficits, the Jewish community center building in the Detroit suburb of Oak Park may close this spring. The Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit announced Monday that a committee is going to recommend that the building shut down in light of annual losses of $1 million and a total deficit of $6…
“The connection I have with Judaism, to me, is very special,” explained Chava Karen Knox, 48. “When you recognize that God is in everything around you, it centers you in who you are.” Knox is an African-American woman who was born and raised in Detroit and always felt a strong connection to Judaism. She converted…
Scars in the Garden from Jewish Daily Forward on Vimeo. “The Black community was resistant to the Jewish community coming into the neighborhood at first,” explained Chava Karen Knox, an African-American woman who converted to Judaism a couple of years ago. Knox is referring to the Jewish volunteers who work on a weekly basis in…
The metropolitan Detroit regional office of the U.S. Postal Service issued a clarification to its branches after a local post office said it could not accept mail sent to Israel. A post office in Southfield, Mich., had told clients that mail was not deliverable to Israel because of the Israel-Gaza conflict. Ed Moore, a spokesman…
(JTA) — The rarity arose in the initial meeting of first-year Detroit Tigers manager Brad Ausmus and his second baseman Ian Kinsler, newly traded from the Texas Rangers: a Jewish player reporting to a Jewish manager. Ausmus was “raised the same way I was,” Kinsler learned, with one Jewish parent and an upbringing in which…
(JTA) — Sure, the news from the city of Detroit seems endlessly grim: bankruptcy, crime and so forth. But the metro area, whose northwest suburbs host a panoply of Jewish amenities, is the most affordable place in the United States to raise a “committed Jewish family,” at least according to one graduate student’s admittedly “back-of-the-napkin”…
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