A lapsed haredi Orthodox Jew is suing the Quebec government for $1.25 million for not enforcing provincial education guidelines that he says left him virtually illiterate and unemployable. Yonanan Lowen, 36, attended two still-operating illegal haredi Tosh yeshivas north of Montreal and spoke only in Yiddish. He says he never learned to read or write…
At least 1,000 Palestinians will receive a free university education in Venezuela. The president of the Republic of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, welcomed 119 Palestinian students who will be trained in the field of medicine through the new Yasser Arafat Scholarship Program, and announced the expansion of the program. “We will train at least 1,000 doctors,…
You would have to have a heart encrusted with cynicism to not be moved by Malala Yousafzai. It is, in many ways, a modern miracle. An activist for equal education for young girls in her native Pakistan, Malala survived a Taliban bullet and expanded her local quest into an international movement for women’s education in…
The Michigan State University students were still jet-lagged from their ten-hour flight when news of rockets striking Sderot reached them in Jerusalem. The next morning, June 29 — just the third day of their summer Jewish Studies program in Israel — the students heard Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proclaim Israel “ready” for what would soon…
Five years ago, Kendall Weistroffer had almost no connection to Judaism. The Colorado native rarely stepped foot in a synagogue, hadn’t celebrated a bat mitzvah and seemed as likely to study Finnish as Hebrew. She eventually met Rabbi Michael Sunshine, director of Jewish Student Connection, a network of Jewish high school discussion groups in Denver,…
In her travels throughout St. Louis as coordinator of the Student-to-Student program, Fawn Chapel has gotten to hear some humorous questions regarding Jewish life and culture. “One time, a kid asked, ‘So if you read backwards, do you also speak backwards?’” Chapel recalled. Other favorites include “Do you celebrate birthdays?” and “Can you celebrate Thanksgiving?”…
Getty Images (JTA) — With the new school year nearly upon us, Jewish educational leaders are scrambling to prepare their teachers to discuss this summer’s Gaza War. The most pressing challenge is to design age-appropriate conversations: At which grade level might classroom discussions include potentially frightening topics, such as the wounding of non-combatants, kidnapping of young…
The 9-year-old girl was unusually quiet that Sunday evening at supper. Her parents thought that maybe she was tired. After all, she had worked all afternoon in the family’s booth at The Shalom Y’all Food Festival in Forsyth Park. Finally, the girl told her parents that she wanted to talk about that morning’s class at…
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