Most students on 10-day guided tours to Israel come to climb Massada, snorkel and visit iconic tourist stops. Ava Skolnik, on the other hand, spent her days sowing gardens and digging mud ovens for a town in Southern Israel. Skolnik, a student at Drexel University, and 15 other students from Philadelphia, were participants of “Philly…
Video: Nate Lavey The “Little Shul,” as its supporters call it, stands in the middle of a dense street of row homes. But in a big way, it stands alone. It is the last operating row-house shul in South Philly. During the early part of the last century, there were 155 synagogues like it in…
Philadelphia’s Jewish federation is facing a crisis of leadership. Home to the sixth-largest Jewish community in the country, Philadelphia has a new museum of American Jewish history, Jewish day schools, thriving synagogues, and a major liberal rabbinical seminary. Yet the CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia, Ira Schwartz, departed abruptly in early May,…
Author and professor Jeffrey Rosen has been named president and chief executive officer of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. “We are extremely proud to announce a CEO and President of Jeffrey Rosen’s caliber as a constitutional scholar, journalist, and educator,” said National Constitution Center Chairman Jeb Bush. “I look forward to working in hand…
The stories of Ariel Sharon and Happy Fernandez are a study in contrasts. Sharon, as we all know, is being kept alive in an Israeli hospital seven years after suffering a massive stroke. He was prime minister at the time, had just dramatically pulled Israel out of Gaza and founded a new centrist political party,…
Howie Lassoff, who helped lead Maccabi Tel Aviv to six league titles and won Maccabiah gold with the U.S. squad, has died. Lassoff, a member of the Philadelphia Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, died Feb. 7 following a battle with cancer. He was 57. The 6-foot-10 Lassoff was the starting center for the Israeli national…
Pulitzer-Prize winning correspondent and author Richard Ben Cramer, best known for his chronicle of the 1988 U.S. presidential election, died on Monday in Baltimore. The cause of death was lung cancer, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, where Cramer worked for seven years. He was 62. Cramer won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for…
The humble bagel is a staple of Western Jewish culture, but what most of us know about it amounts to little more than a shmear. After all, bagels are generally something we buy, not bake. This makes the bagel ideal for a hands-on workshop, especially at a restaurant-bakery called Spread Bagelry, one of the few…
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