Read all the Forward’s news stories in one place
Read all the Forward’s news stories in one place
Read all the Forward’s news stories in one place
Read all the Forward’s news stories in one place
Three years after a Lower East Side match that seemed made in heaven, Manhattan’s historic but struggling Sixth Street Community Synagogue and popular Chabad rabbi Simon Jacobson have divorced amid acrimony to rival that of a bad marriage from an Isaac Bashevis Singer tale. Jacobson, once seen by members of the synagogue as a potential…
In a cold and windswept Staten Island cemetery, four dozen people huddled together to recite Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer, and to mark the 100th yahrzeit of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire’s victims. Twenty-two of the victims were laid to rest in 1911 at the Mount Richmond Cemetery, which is owned by the Hebrew Free Burial…
For a list of events commemorating the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, click here. Piece by piece, the everyday blouses were assembled by hand, crafted in small steps from cuffs to collars, from basting to buttons. In cramped quarters, garment factory workers stitched the seams, fitted the sleeves and attached the lace as hundreds of $3…
In 1959, a group of Holocaust survivors, most of them living in the secular, Yiddish-speaking enclave of the Amalgamated Houses in the Bronx, did something remarkable. Each of them shelled out $500 of hard-earned money to found a summer camp in the Catskill Mountains. The survivors’ goal was to pass on to the next generation…
Long faced with extinction, Yiddish literature has been preserved for the digital age with a newly activated online archive. Since the beginning of February, more than 10,000 titles have been available for browsing, skimming and study via the National Yiddish Book Center, an Amherst, Mass., collection that includes more than one million volumes that have…
When Lori Cahan-Simon, a singer and music teacher at the I. L. Peretz Workmen’s Circle school of Ohio, in Cleveland, was promoted to Yiddish teacher 10 years ago, her excitement was hampered by anxiety. “I had no connection to other Yiddish teachers,” she told the Forward, “and when I looked online, I saw nothing.” Finally,…
This month, during the first yahrzeit of my father, Mordkhe Schaechter, of blessed memory, I recalled a story my father used to tell us about his paternal grandfather, Reb Itsye Mordkhe — a shokhet (slaughterer) who was not very popular among the butchers of the shtetl because whenever he rendered one of their animals treyf,…
It’s been more than three quarters of a century since young intellectuals were voicing their Yiddish-inflected ideas in the parks, cafés and tenements of lower Manhattan. But the days of the Yiddish intelligentsia are still rolling for 24-year-old Menachem Yankl Ejdelman, who is the newly appointed leader of Yugntruf, a worldwide organization of young Yiddish…
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