Last week, Marra went to synagogue in her adopted hometown for the first time. She was not greeted warmly. As she entered the synagogue, she was pointedly asked, “Are you invited to be here?” Not dissuaded — a Hollywood producer by trade, she is not easily daunted — she let the questioner know that she…
Most American Jews have always believed America to be special among diaspora countries, fundamentally unlike Europe or the Middle East, where Jews lived for centuries before our grandparents and great-grandparents were forced to flee for their lives. That was before the Pittsburgh shooting that left 11 Jews dead. Now, against a backdrop of increasingly emboldened…
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s count of hate crime against Jews jumped significantly in 2017, according to an annual report released Tuesday morning. The FBI recorded 938 single-bias hate crimes targeting Jews in 2017, a sharp increase from the 684 incidents it recorded in 2016, and the largest number of hate crimes targeting Jews since…
Two-and-half-weeks ago, the Philadelphia community came together to formally open the Horwitz-Wasserman Holocaust Plaza at the first public Holocaust memorial in downtown Philadelphia. Just five days later, a gunman killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue, and it became tragically clear that our concern about history repeating itself was warranted. November 9th marks the 80th…
Shabbat was approaching, but Rabbi Jeffrey Myers didn’t have time to write his Saturday morning sermon. And this wasn’t just any Shabbat — it was the first Shabbat after the shooting that killed seven of his congregants, and four others. But on Friday afternoon, he officiated at a funeral. Then he was attending a shiva…
Cecil. David. Rose. Joyce. Sylvan. Bernice. Last Saturday, those six, along with seven other worshippers killed inside the Tree of Life synagogue building on October 27, became part of the long list of Jewish martyrs. But before that, they were six friendly faces that the middle schoolers of nearby Community Day School knew from attending…
My name is Johanna Reiss. You may already know it; I am the Author of the memoir The Upstairs Room and other books about my experiences as a Jewish child hidden in Holland during World War II and how I managed to live through it. Since 1945, I thought I was done with my old…
Before October 27th, if anyone told us that Pittsburgh’s Jewish community would be thrust into the national spotlight as the target of the deadliest attack on Jews in American history, we would not have believed it. For the past two years, under the banner of Bend the Arc: Pittsburgh, we had been organizing locally in…
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