Rabbi

 
For many seder participants, there is a Fifth Question each year — what new Haggadah do I want to buy this year, or what new seder plate, or what new artistic item for my yom tov table?
 
The answer — even in this age of online commerce — often comes in a Jewish gift shop and/or bookstore.
 
At Manhattan Judaica in Midtown, some shoppers started their Pesach shopping this week, looking at the latest Haggadahs and seder plates.
 

 
Sara Hurwitz, the woman of the hour at this year’s international conference of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA), revealed here on Sunday that she is considering relinquishing her controversial and unique new title of “rabba.”
 

 
When Rabbi Milton Steinberg died suddenly and tragically in 1950 at the age of 46, there was a keen awareness that the Jewish community had lost one of its great literary, intellectual and spiritual voices. Steinberg was a preacher of uncommon eloquence and depth, a literary craftsman of prodigious output, and a scholar at home with both rabbinic and classic literature.
 

Yeshiva and day school administrators who gathered at the Board of Jewish Education on the eve of Yom Kippur voiced their displeasure with a change in funding that will end basic grants to their institutions and instead provide health care coverage and life insurance to additional teachers.

The mood was tense and the discussion spirited as representatives from more than 50 New York-area Jewish schools, spanning the ideological gamut, spoke out against a recent decision by the Fund for Jewish Education to cut about $2.2 million in school grants.

The scent of cardamom and rosewater wafted through the hallways of Manhattan Day School last Thursday, as the Upper West Side yeshiva held a festival to culminate several weeks of study about Sephardic and Mizrachi Jews.Youngsters at MDS, where most students are Ashkenazi, dressed in embroidered caftans, sequined chadors and elaborate turbans.

Elissa Sampson and her husband, Jonathan Boyarin, longtime members of the Stanton Street Shul, held a blue paper napkin between them as they twirled to the music of the four-piece klezmer band hired by the synagogue for the afternoon.

The Passover story is about the Jewish people gaining their freedom from slavery in Egypt. This year, two Jewish groups are connecting the holiday to a campaign to free American children from the bondage of hunger.

The Jewish Council for Public Affairs and Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger are helping communities around the country hold a “Child Nutrition Seder” to both raise awareness of the issue of proper childhood nutrition and build support for the reauthorization of congressional legislation providing billions of dollars for federal nutrition programs.

In the highly charged political and religious climate of France, the country’s influential Jewish student union has been on the front lines of the fight to beat back hate.It made world headlines this year when it launched its controversial, and since pulled, advertising campaign with the words “Dirty Jew” scrawled in graffiti-like script over the images of Jesus and Mary.

At a time when the Jewish community was hard-pressed to recruit and retain educators because of meager salaries and benefits, and perceived low prestige, the Coalition for the Advancement of Jewish Education was designing a weeklong program introducing college students to the advantages of pursuing careers in Jewish education.Fifteen years later the Schusterman College Program, as the CAJE course is now called, released a study showing that 70 percent of alumni are employed in Jewish education or Jewish communal services, or they are planning to enter those fields.