I have published three books about rabbis who were the Torah leaders in our generation, yet I always hesitated to write about the local Torah leader in Denver, a giant of our generation, the late Rabbi Israel Kagan.
The Talmud, in tractate Sukkah, discusses constructing a sukkah on an elephant. The Biblical Museum of Natural History in Israel made it happen. “It’s hard to avoid talking about the elephant in the room, which is literally the elephant in the room,” said Rabbi Natan Slifkin, the museum director known as the “zoo rabbi.”
The first Israeli to go to space had a problem that only a rabbi could solve.He would be flying around the earth so fast that he’d see a sunrise every 90 minutes. But Shabbat is supposed to start at sundown every seventh day. This might have meant that every 10 1/2 hours the Israeli would have to break out the wine and the challah and the battery-powered space candles.
Andrew Waxman, a banking and risk management consultant, has written what amounts to a field guide to the varieties of being and praying Jewish in New York City. For My Year in New York Synagogues, he spent his Friday evenings and Shabbat mornings in 2025 visiting nearly every synagogue within walking distance of his home on the Upper West Side.
In 2023, for its 110th Anniversary Magazine, the IJN paired teen interviewers with Holocaust survivors for “Holocaust Across the Generations.” Ami Gelman, then in 9th grade at Denver Academy of Torah, interviewed Cantor Zachary Kutner, who passed away this week.
It was 1943 in Nazi-occupied Holland, and a Jewish baby boy, Efraim Kochba (born Ernst Bernard van Coevorden), had been entrusted to Jacqueline Meents-Lenstra, a Dutch Christian woman, and her Jewish husband by a Jewish couple who were neighbors and later perished in the Holocaust.
Jewish and Israeli-owned restaurants in New York City appear to have a new off-menu offering: introducing Jewish singles to one another. “I feel like going to a restaurant — whether kosher, Jewish- or Israeli-owned — I’m more likely to meet someone who is pro-Israel,” Skye Ostreicher, 35, said.
Behind the imposing stone walls of Eastern State Penitentiary — the Philadelphia prison that once held Al Capone — sits a small, unlikely synagogue built by inmates, for inmates, nearly a century ago. Now, a new exhibition is telling its story. Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia’s Fairmount neighborhood, was active from its founding in 1829 until its closing in 1971.
When a cancer diagnosis comes it’s always a shock — and Dr. Loraine Alderman was no exception. What did surprise her, however, was that among the literature she was reading, she wasn’t finding stories about people like herself, even though she fell into the age group of women most likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer.
According to Rabbi Sam Spector of Congregation Kol Ami in Salt Lake City, Jews and Latter-day Saints have a lot in common. Brigham Young, who pioneered the move of Mormons to Utah, is often referred to by his followers as America’s Moses. He led his followers “across the Mississippi, across the wilderness, and settled in a promised land that had America’s Dead Sea.” He called it Zion.
Ricky Mason remembers his first introduction to what was then known as the Boy Scouts. His mother told him when he was seven years old that he would join scouting four years later and become an Eagle Scout. “My mother told me I was gonna do it, and so that was sort of enough for me,” Mason said.
A little over a year ago, it was unfathomable that Eliya Cohen would be in Denver, Colorado, because a little over a year ago Eliya was being held captive by Hamas terrorists in the tunnels of Gaza. A little over a year ago, it was unfathomable that Eliya would be reunited with his family and longtime girlfriend, Ziv Aboud, who he believed for 505 days had been killed on Oct. 7, 2023.
Danielle Meyers still smiles when she recalls the moment she first noticed her husband, Shlomo Meyers, at summer camp more than a decade ago.Two years later, in 2014, the couple married under the chuppah and moved to Danielle’s hometown, where their life looks much like that of other couples. They split household chores. They take long walks around their neighborhood. They unwind with their favorite movies. They also both have Down syndrome.
Before March 1, all of Dr. George Asfour’s medical interventions took place in hospital operating rooms. They did not involve running from his car on a highway after a missile attack, assessing the wounded, extracting a patient with a head injury and treating him on the spot.
Dr. Shimrit Tirosh Maman, 45, is the first woman to be appointed chair of the Israel Space Agency. “I’m also the youngest to be selected. But the important thing is to highlight my achievements, not my gender,” she says.
An only-in-New York tale of serendipity and Jewish geography: Mazel Tofu is a collective of Jewish Mandarin speakers that formed two years ago. A Chabad Purim party in 2024 brought together three men with mutual friends and the vague knowledge that the other shared their affinity for Chinese: Jacob Scheer, a media relations associate at Chabad; Ben Weinstein, a teacher at SAR High School, an Orthodox day school; and Mr. Shlumpadink, the stage name of an accordion player who performs folk songs in Yiddish, Chinese and Japanese. Soon, they were speaking in Chinese.
Moshe Goldsmith of Teaneck, NJ, never imagined that something he did almost absentmindedly during his Masa Israel Journey gap year would one day help save a life.
In 2023, Guinness World Records issued a temporary pause on processing record applications from Israel and the Palestinian territories. Interest in the pause has ignited recently, with regard to attempted records for most organ donors congregated in one place. Voluntary organ donation? That’s a titanic sacrifice. Still, the folks at Guinness won’t budge, a stance that two Denver kidney donors found quite unfortunate. “I think it’s ridiculous,” kidney donor Chaya Parkoff says, “and I’m not sure why they’re doing it.”
Gabrielle Strauchler has been campaigning for years to remove mobile phones from her classroom. The English teacher for boys in Karnei Shomron, in northern Samaria in the West Bank, says the devices distract pupils, particularly those who are clearly addicted to digital games or social media.
“When she was born, we realized immediately that something was wrong with her heart and that she needed treatment,” said Nadia (not her real name), a Druze woman from a war-affected village in Syria, speaking about her toddler. Nadia arrived in Israel earlier this month with her daughter, in a transfer coordinated by the Israel Defense Forces and Save a Child’s Heart.
More than a century ago, Galveston, Texas, the busy Gulf Coast port and longtime vacation destination 50 miles southeast of Houston welcomed so many European immigrants — including some 10,000 Jews — it earned the moniker “The Ellis Island of the West.”
A scene from a preschool classroom in 2008 produced a remarkable moment. Tami Ellison remembers it as if it were yesterday. Ellison was teaching a science program for three-to-five year-olds at Temple Emanuel about the properties of symmetry.
Four American magicians are traveling throughout Israel, bringing their performances to those who have been directly affected by the two-year Gaza war. The troupe is making its fourth visit to the country since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led onslaught on Israel through the Magic4Israel organization, whose catchphrase is “Making smiles appear.”
If it weren’t for an Ashkenazi Jew named Stanton T. Friedman, the world might have long ago forgotten what’s come to be known simply as the “Roswell incident.” Instead, countless books, documentaries and made-for-TV dramas have explored the 1947 discovery of mysterious materials found on a New Mexico ranch that Friedman argued were the relics of extraterrestrials.