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  • Bryn Mawr suspends using name of founder

    JTA Staff|Sep 8, 2017

    NEW YORK (JTA)-Bryn Mawr College in suburban Philadelphia said it will place a yearlong "moratorium" on the use of the name of a founder and past president who was a known anti-Semite. The name of the library and great hall are named for M. Carey Thomas, who served as the private college's president from 1894 to 1922. According to biographer Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Thomas prevented the hiring of Jewish teachers at the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore, and later made sure she was not dealing with...

  • A trove of Nazi-era objects in Argentina stuns investigators

    JTA Staff|Jun 30, 2017

    BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (JTA)-A cache of 75 original Nazi objects discovered earlier this month by the Argentine Federal Police has been evaluated as "unprecedented" and "the biggest" discovery of its type. The objects, discovered earlier this month in a hidden room of a house in the northern part of the city, included equipment used for Nazi medical experiments during the Holocaust. They were analyzed a week ago at Interpol headquarters in Lyon, France, Federal Police Commissioner Marcelo El...

  • Ruderman Family Foundation expands its disability work

    JTA Staff|Apr 21, 2017

    (JTA)-Until recently, the Ruderman Family Foundation helped pioneer an issue within the Jewish community-key word "within." While donating locally to Jewish causes from its base in Boston, it also fostered disability inclusion among Jewish and Israeli institutions. It ran a Jewish Special Needs Funding Conference and offered grants and prizes to Jewish institutions that made themselves more accessible to those with disabilities. But look for the word "Jewish" on the "inclusion" page of the...

  • Don Rickles is dead at 90

    JTA Staff|Apr 14, 2017

    NEW YORK (JTA)-Don Rickles, the bullet-headed comedian and actor whose pioneering brand of insult comedy earned him the nickname "Mr. Warmth," has died at 90. Rickles died Thursday morning, April 6, at his home in Los Angeles from kidney failure, according to his publicist. He would have turned 91 on May 8. Bald and squat, Rickles would pace the stages of nightclubs and late night talk shows seeking out "victims" in the audience, riffing on their weight, ethnicity and dress, calling them...

  • Two days of terror: Israeli mother of 6 killed, pregnant woman stabbed

    JTA Staff|Jan 29, 2016

    (JTA)-A day after witnessing her mother's brutal murder, Dafna Meir's teenage daughter spoke before hundreds who had come to mourn her. Dafna Meir, 38, a mother of six, was stabbed to death on Sunday near the entrance of her West Bank home. "It's hard for me to think we will not laugh together or fight anymore, that you won't accompany me to the IDF induction ceremony, down the aisle, and to the maternity ward," Renana Meir, 17, said at a Jerusalem cemetery, calling her mother her best friend....

  • SodaStream offers to take in refugees

    JTA staff|Oct 2, 2015

    Israeli company Soda-Stream has offered to take in Syrian refugees and employ them in its new factory in the Negev Desert. In an announcement over the weekend, SodaStream and the mayor of Rahat, which is near the home beverage maker's factory, said they can absorb up to 200 families. Some 30 percent of the 1,100 workers at the factory live in the Bedouin city led by Mayor Talal al-Krenawi. "As the son of a Holocaust survivor, I refuse to stand by and observe this human tragedy unfold right...

  • Theodore Bikel, 'Tevye,' dies at 91

    JTA Staff, JTA|Jul 31, 2015

    (JTA)-Theodore Bikel, an actor and folk singer who was recognized in 1997 with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, has died at 91. Bikel, who won fame playing Tevye in "Fiddler on the Roof," doing more performances of the role than any other actor, died Tuesday morning of natural causes at the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Born in Vienna, Bikel fled Austria at age 13 with his family after the 1938 Nazi...

  • Two Jews among confirmed dead in Amtrak crash

    JTA Staff|May 22, 2015

    NEW YORK (JTA)-A 39-year-old executive with an education startup and a 20-year-old naval academy student were among the seven people confirmed dead from an Amtrak train derailment in Philadelphia. Rachel Jacobs, the executive, who also is the daughter of former Michigan State Senator Gilda Jacobs, and Justin Zemser, a second-year student at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, were both Jewish. The accident, on a northbound train Tuesday night, injured more than 200 people, and...

  • Take JTA's 2014 news quiz

    JTA Staff|Jan 9, 2015

    (JTA)—What made headlines (in Israel, the U.S. and around the world) in 2014? Test your knowledge with JTA’s annual news quiz: 1. Palestinian officials apologized to Czech authorities after the Palestinian envoy to Prague, Jamal Al-Jamal, was killed in an explosion in his home because: a) a cache of illegal weapons was discovered there. b) the explosion damaged a historic Czech cemetery. c) the ambassador’s residence was being used by Palestinian militants as a safe house. d) Yasser Arafat’s widow, Suha, blamed the explosion on the Czech g...

  • JTA Year In Review

    JTA Staff|Aug 30, 2013

    NEW YORK (JTA)—From wars and elections to scandals and triumphs, JTA takes a look back at the highlights of the Jewish year 5773. September 2012 Islamists throw a homemade grenade into a Jewish supermarket near Paris, injuring one. The incident is part of a major increase in attacks on Jews in France in 2012. October 2012 William Herskowitz, a member of an internship program in Israel for American Jews, shoots dead a hotel employee in the Israeli resort city of Eilat and then kills himself f...