Not quite two weeks after being knighted by Pope Francis and made a member of the Papal Order of St. Sylvester, Park East Synagogue’s Senior Rabbi Arthur Schneier received Albania’s Presidential Medal for Special Civilian Merits at a ceremony on May 8th held at New York’s Russian Tea Room. Addressing a roomful of international consuls…
1) Eighteen thousand and five hundred Jews live in Rhode Island — about 1.75% of the state’s population. 2) The central courtyard at Providence’s Roger Williams National Memorial was donated in 1931 by Jerome Hahn, in memory of his father, Isaac Hahn, the first Jewish citizen to hold elected office in the city. 3) Newport’s…
As senior cantor at New York’s Central Synagogue, Angela Buchdahl was known to team up with one of her colleagues to perform a “mash-up” — an artful blending of two thematically linked but musically distinct songs. “Hatikvah” was woven into “America the Beautiful.” For Passover, the two cantors combined “Dayeinu” with the spiritual “Oh, Freedom.”…
What has become of Indiana’s historic synagogues? The following four historic synagogues were originally built as synagogues and are still standing in Indiana. This list is not exhaustive and it does not include historic Jewish congregations who worshipped in other types of buildings, such as homes and former churches, or other historic Indiana synagogues that…
My name is Ken Gordon, and I don’t belong to a synagogue. When the Pew Research Center reported that two-thirds of American Jews are in the same situation, I didn’t break out into a cold Jewish sweat, as did so many of my colleagues. I thought instead: I’m not alone! My wife and I send…
Walking around the depressed Ramsgate of today, it is somewhat difficult to imagine that when the financier Sir Moses Montefiore purchased a country estate here in 1831, this seaside settlement was considered the height of sophistication and chic. Located on a far easterly point of the Kentish coast of England, bereft of the holidaymakers that…
Now and again, I find myself in a synagogue that really tugs at my heart. The last time that happened was six years ago, when I first came upon the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue, in downtown Washington, D.C., or, to use its original name, Congregation Adas Israel. This time, the synagogue that caught my…
When Cantor Angela Buchdahl walks among the pews, greeting congregants before Friday night services at Manhattan’s venerable Central Synagogue, she encounters a mélange of Jewish faces, including blacks, Asians and Hispanics. It’s a diversity that reflects the emergence of an American Jewry of unprecedented ethnic breadth, and a diversity that Buchdahl — born to an…
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