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Articles written by Steve Lipman


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  • 'There was no time to sleep': 4 Jews reflect on a year of helping Ukrainians at war

    Steve Lipman|Mar 3, 2023

    (JTA) - In the months after Russian tanks rolled into her country last February, the music largely stopped for Elizaveta Sherstuk. The founder of a Jewish choral ensemble called Aviv in her hometown of Sumy, in the northeastern flank of Ukraine, Sherstuk had to put singing aside in favor of her day job and personal mission: delivering aid to Jews in Sumy. "There was no time to sleep," Sherstuk recalled to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently. "All my team members worked the same, 24/7." A...

  • Knife attack at Chabad headquarters in New York raises security questions

    Steve Lipman, The Jewish Week|Dec 19, 2014

    NEW YORK (The Jewish Week via JTA)—Just three weeks after terrorists killed four worshippers in a Jerusalem synagogue, a man entered a Brooklyn shul and stabbed a 22-year-old Israeli student. New York police officers fatally shot the 49-year-old assailant, who reportedly shouted “Kill the Jews.” At a press conference Tuesday, New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton said there is “no indication” the assailant, identified as Calvin Peters, was connected to a terrorist group. The Tuesday morning attack is being investigated as a hate cr...

  • Phil Baum, AJCongress crusader, dies at 94

    Steve Lipman, The Jewish Week|Apr 18, 2014

    Phil Baum, who joined the American Jewish Congress after college and helped steer the advocacy organization’s growth in membership and influence until he retired as executive director in 2002, died in his sleep on March 27 at his Riverdale home. He was 94. Mr. Baum, who became the organization’s top professional leader in 1994, served the AJCongress during the decades when it ranked among the most effective voices for Jewish interests in the United States. It played a prominent role is such issues as pro-Israel advocacy and Soviet Jewry; it...

  • The last Jews of Ethiopia

    Steve Lipman, New York Jewish Week|Jun 21, 2013

    The remaining members of the Ethiopian Jewish community will make aliyah by the end of this summer, and the Jewish Agency educational compound in the northern part of the country that has prepared them for their new lives in Israel will be turned over this month to the Ethiopian government. The compound in Gondar, which earlier was under the auspices of the North American Conference on Ethiopian Jewry, “will not be needed beyond July,” said Misha Galperin, who heads the Jewish Agency’s department of international development. “That’s it. There...

  • 'Hidden Encyclical' no longer hidden

    Steve Lipman, New York Jewish Week|Jun 21, 2013

    BETHESDA, Md.—Did Pope Pius XII, the leader of the Catholic Church during World War II and the subsequent decade, suppress a landmark Vatican document that his predecessor, Pius XI, had commissioned, a document that would have unambiguously criticized racism and anti-Semitism? And did that document—an encyclical, in Vatican parlance—actually exist? Historians and theologians have been asking these questions for decades. The so-called hidden encyclical has played a role—contrasting the attitudes and personalities of the two popes—since the end o...

  • A taste of Poland's Jewish past

    Steve Lipman, New York Jewish Week|May 17, 2013
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    By Steve Lipman New York Jewish Week WARSAW, Poland—At a corner table in the Pod Samsonem restaurant, under framed etchings of the Bible’s Samson and of old Warsaw streetscapes, a middle-aged woman cuts up her “Jewish style” trout one recent evening. At other tables, next to walls lined with framed photographs of rabbis, and menorahs on a small shelf, other customers eat their entrees of “Karp po żydowsku” (Jewish-style carp) and “Kavior żydowski” (Jewish caviar). Pod Samsonem (the name means “under Samson”) is a prominent example in...