Canada

She was one of the last supports of a world that was crumbling to pieces.

When Mina Bern died of heart failure last week at the age of 98, the Yiddish theater world mourned one of its leading lights, an indefatigable performer and champion of the Yiddish language whose career spanned three continents and virtually the whole of the 20th century.

The product of a Modern Orthodox home and a longtime resident of Boston, Yehuda Kurtzer reached an important spiritual decision while he was living in Washington, D.C., for a while three years ago. He and his wife, Stephanie Ives, had become active in the D.C. Minyan, an independent prayer group that meets in the capital’s Dupont Circle area, and wanted to start a similar minyan when he moved back to Boston with her for graduate school.

“We knew we had to have something like this in Boston,” Kurtzer says.

Today they do.

The ongoing hunt for Nazi war criminals made news last week when evidence emerged that Aribert Heim, the wartime “Dr. Death” in Mauthausen who conducted experiments on prisoners, was given haven in Egypt and presumably died there. Efraim Zuroff has been searching for information about Heim throughout his two decades as director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office.

Stemming from an initial mumps outbreak that wreaked havoc at a Jewish camp this summer, 247 New York City residents plus 131 other state residents have since contracted the disease, which remains mostly contained among fervently Orthodox adolescent boys in pockets of New York, New Jersey and Quebec, according to official reports from the New York City and State Departments of Health.

Baltimore — What do an expert on Buddhism, a Christian theologian and a former Reagan administration bureaucrat have to say about Jewish spirituality to a room full of Conservative rabbis? That was the question here this week when all three addressed several hundred rabbis and guests at the 99th annual convention of the Rabbinical Assembly, the organization representing the world’s 1,500 Conservative rabbis.

When the Synagogue Council of America — the only national rabbinic group representing Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Jewry — broke up in 1994 after 68 years, observers said it underscored the growing rift between Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews.
“Maybe it has outlived its usefulness,” mused member Rabbi Fabian Schonfeld of the Young Israel of Kew Garden Hills at that time.

Orthodox rabbis are pledging to take action in confronting the reality of sexual abuse in their midst.
The nation's main association of centrist Orthodox clergy, the 1,200-member Rabbinical Council of America, has passed a strongly worded resolution committing the organization and its members to report acts or suspicions of child abuse to the police: a watershed break with longstanding practice in the Torah-observant community of protecting errant rabbis rather than reporting them to civil authorities.

Opposition is building to a city Health Department campaign to warn new Jewish parents against a circumcision procedure it describes as life threatening: even before the plan is launched.
In a full-page ad in last week's Brooklyn Orthodox paper, The Jewish Press, a new group calling itself Friends of Bris Milah (ritual circumcision) urged parents to call a 24-hour hot line "to report any conversation initiated by doctors, hospitals and other professional caregivers" regarding the procedure known as metzitzah b'peh.

The ongoing hunt for Nazi war criminals made news last week when evidence emerged that Aribert Heim, the wartime “Dr. Death” in Mauthausen who conducted experiments on prisoners, was given haven in Egypt and presumably died there. Efraim Zuroff has been searching for information about Heim throughout his two decades as director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office.

Sydney, Australia: One by one, the elderly men with white hair or bald heads raised their hands.
Sitting in the sunlit Terrace Room of the Australian National Maritime Museum, at the edge of Sydney Harbor, they listened as Henry Lippmann, a fellow octogenarian, stood with hand-written notes and microphone in hand reading brief snippets of their life stories, asking each to acknowledge his presence.