Free Republic

After being forced to host an LGBT club and violate tenets of Orthodox Judaism, Yeshiva University is fighting to preserve religious freedom.Must religious institutions abandon certain core tenets to operate in the public square? That question is at the heart of yet another lawsuit arising from the tensions between religious liberty and anti-discrimination laws.This week, New York’s Yeshiva University — an Orthodox Jewish university — filed an emergency application to the U.S. Supreme Court after a state supreme court judge ordered the school to recognize an LGBT student group in violation of its religious beliefs regarding sexual morality. Yeshiva has...

Rabbi Azaria Ariel, traveled to an undisclosed ranch in Israel to lead the Temple InstituteÂ’s efforts to raise a red heifer for the performance of the commandment of producing the purifying ashes of the red heifer. He recently inspected the current red heifer candidates and shared their status. One of the two more mature candidates is still very viable, even though it has a few hairs which arenÂ’t sufficiently red, as required by halacha (Jewish law). Two new candidates were born in the early months of 2020, and they are currently viable. The ordinance of the red heifer is described...

A humorous (if you understand Jewish ritual law--halacha) take on "the halacha" of Christmas trees-- Know that Jews have myriad laws governing daily life... For example, Chanukah candles must be kindles at a certain time, and last a certain duration...and oy vey what happens in a million after-the-fact cases where one did NOT meet the requirements, etc. All the funny quirky things you positively love about us Jews. What if they were transposed onto Christmas... the results might be something like this: (key: "Mitzvah" means commandment:) 1. PREPARATIONS FOR XMAS MUST NOT BEGIN(1) BEFORE THANKSGIVING.(2) THIS APPLIES TO PREPARATIONS WHICH...

The women grabbed my hands and joyously led me into the circle. Rather than circle dancing, this felt like spiral dancing – each spin propelled me further from the ground and into the endless Jerusalem night sky. It was late Friday night, the usual prayer services at the Western Wall had long finished. We were part of an impromptu group led by a charismatic rabbi who sat on the partition separating the men from the women to lead the prayers for welcoming in the Shabbat. The spiritual energy was palpable. With each kick from under a colorful flowing skirt we...

Shai Zarhi and Itamar Lapid want to take the renaissance of secular interest in Judaism to an unprecedented level: Now that secular study centers (batei midrash), rituals and prayers have been developed, Zarhi and Lapid, both from the Midrasha at the kibbutz movement's Seminar Oranim (the secular beit midrash that helped pioneer the phenomenon), are talking about fashioning a secular halakha, or Jewish legal code - a detailed code that, like religious halakha, will include a punctilious formulation of dos and don'ts, according to secular principles. Lapid, to be precise, refers to an "Israeli halakha," because in his vision, religious...

A victory for Hamas in Wednesday's Palestinian election will strengthen the Right in Israel and harm Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's Kadima Party, MKs on the Israeli Right said on Tuesday. They said a Hamas victory would serve as a wake-up call for the Israeli public that would begin a process of support shifting from Kadima and Labor to parties further to the Right. "Hamas is a terrorist organization that wants to destroy Israel, and it was strengthened by the disengagement," Likud chairman Binyamin Netanyahu told reporters outside the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. The head of the Likud's...

It is a denial of the Jewish ideal of the fundamental value of life that drives the forces that wish to remove Terri Schiavo's feeding tube.The Terri Schiavo saga in Florida, where a patient in a vegetative state has recently had her feeding tube reinserted by order of the legislature and governor, reminds us of the reality of modern life. An inescapable result of the extraordinary technological progress of the last several decades has been that critically ill patients who would have died early in their illnesses, often in the relative comfort of their homes, are now kept alive much...

Rabbi Yaakov Y. Horowitz's version of American History 101 runs something like this: When the colonies were settled, the shochet, or kosher slaughterer, was not far behind. When gold prospectors flocked to California, so did the kosher inspectors. When Passover arrived at Army camps during the Civil War, so did the matzo. The founder of American Jewish Legacy, a nonprofit historical organization, Rabbi Horowitz has created an exhibit of kosher practices that offers glimpses of how Jewish dietary laws were followed from the earliest arrivals of Jews in the mid-17th century into the last century. "The development of Judaism was...