At Rikers Island, Jewish volunteers find a ‘powerful connection’ with inmates by leading prayer services
Jewish young adults from UWS Base offer company, conversation and Torah to those in custody at the city’s most notorious jail
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Opinion Hate crimes and antisemitism are rising in NYC. The governor’s plan will make things worse
Rikers Island, New York City’s jail complex, is in a humanitarian crisis. Mired by dysfunction, unsanitary conditions and two deaths in the past month, the situation is dire. Both the current and previous mayor vowed to close the complex, given decades of violence and mismanagement. Despite this, instead of looking for real solutions to the…
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News Rikers Island grape juice theft robs Jewish detainees of kiddush
When Cantor Ilana Plutzer was serving as a chaplain at Rikers Island a few years ago, she went to the kitchen to get grape juice for Jews in the jail who said they were not getting it with Shabbat meals as they were promised. Plutzer said a kitchen worker told her they did not have…
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Opinion Epstein’s Death Should Come As No Surprise. America’s Prison System Is Broken.
On Friday, The New York Times reported that Jeffrey Epstein autopsy results confirm that the disgraced financier, who was accused by multiple girls of molestation and rape, had died by suicide. No person in the custody of the state should ever, under any circumstances, be enabled to take their own life. No matter what crime…
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Fast Forward Former IDF Soldier Strangles Seven-Year-Old Daughter To Death
A British man who previously served in the IDF was sentenced to a minimum of 24 years in jail for strangling his daughter to death at their home, the Jewish Chronicle reported. Robert Peters had reportedly researched child killers online before using a dressing gown cord to murder seven-year-old Sophia at the family’s home in…
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Breaking News Federal Judge Orders Florida Prison System To Reinstate Kosher Meal Plan
A U.S. federal judge has ordered the Florida prisons service to provide kosher meals to all prisoners with a “sincere religious basis” for doing so. The ruling issued earlier this month requires the order be implemented by July 1, the Miami Herald reported Tuesday. The ruling comes after the Florida Department of Corrections has dragged…
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News Telling Story of Leo Frank From His Jail Cell
The 1913 trial and conviction of Leo Frank stoked a fiery public debate across America about race, religion, class and anti-Semitism. Frank’s case was so important to the Jewish community that the Forward’s editor, Abraham Cahan, traveled to Atlanta in 1914 to visit Frank in his jail cell. Cahan devoted 250 pages to Frank in…
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Breaking News Radical Islam Spreads in Prisons of France
In France, the path to radical Islam often begins with a minor offence that throws a young man into an overcrowded, violent jail and produces a hardened convert ready for jihad. With the country on heightened security alert since January when French troops began fighting al Qaeda-linked Islamists in Mali, authorities are increasingly worried about…
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