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As an aspiring rabbi, Ethan Witkovsky sees one of his goals as “helping people draw closer to their cultural and literary traditions” while making sense of their lives — and he’s ready to meet them in their homes or workplaces or even in local bars and parks to further that process.

An auction of the 500-piece Judaica collection owned by philanthropist Michael Steinhardt was the "most valuable auction of Judaica ever held," Sotheby's said.

Monday's auction of nearly all of the Michael and Judy Steinhardt Judaica Collection brought in more than $8.5 million, Sotheby's said in a statement, exceeding the pre-sale estimate by $6 million.

Leslie Gottlieb, a lay leader at New York’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, noted the obvious Monday night while speaking to a reporter:

Diners at the famed Midtown restaurant Le Bernardin will occasionally confess to the wine expert serving them that they keep kosher — except for the lobster they are about to order.

Just when John Galliano thought he was on the verge of rehabilitation after a drunken anti-Semitic diatribe in 2011 got him arrested, an online petition is seeking to get him fired before he even teaches one class here at Parsons The New School for Design. 

Parsons had announced last week that the 52-year-old designer agreed to teach without pay a three-day fashion-design master class called “Show Me Emotion.” The school called Galliano a “living legend,” a “technical genius,” and a “master of tailoring, construction, research and thematic investigation.”

Natan Sharansky’s proposal to reduce tensions at the Western Wall has lost support from both Orthodox and non-Orthodox leaders.

When Sharansky, chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, made the plan public a few weeks ago, it received at least tacit approval from a range of activists, including the rabbi of the Western Wall, Shmuel Rabinowitz.

The plan would expand the egalitarian section of the Western Wall Plaza – called Robinson’s Arch – and create a unified entrance to the Wall’s traditional and egalitarian sections. It was meant as a compromise between haredi Orthodox leaders who wanted to maintain exclusive control of the Western Wall, and religious pluralism activists who wanted the site opened to egalitarian prayer.

The head of Hungary’s Raoul Wallenberg Association said he was beaten at a soccer match in Budapest.

Ferenc Orosz told the Hungarian news agency MTI during a conference Monday on hate speech that “first he was verbally assaulted and then his nose was broken after a match at Budapest’s Puskas Stadium which he attended with his family” the previous day.

Just before the Sotheby’s auction of Michael and Judy Steinhardt’s collection of Judaica began this morning, Sotheby’s announced that the highlight of the collection, the illuminated Mishneh Torah, was acquired jointly by The Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the Metropolitan Museum of Art here. This is the first significant collaboration between the two institutions.