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President Donald Trump spoke briefly at the White House Friday and called for state governors to allow for churches and other places of worship to reopen to the public. Trump says he considers houses of worship “essential” and wants them to reopen this weekend.

Rabbi Shalom Shmueli, head of the Nahar Shalom Yeshiva in Jerusalem, is known for his powerful mystic messages. Last week, he participated in a special meeting with other rabbis. Rabbi Shmueli gave over a message he had received from his father, Rabbi It should be noted that Rabbi Shmueli does not make public appearances and his message was made public by Rabbi Yekutiel Fish at his urging. “This announcement must be spread to the entire world,” Rabbi Fish told Breaking Israel news. “This is an imminent emergency. All Jews in exile around the world must come to Israel immediately. They...

The Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board Jerome Powell says more stimulus spending is needed to prevent a slow and painful economic recovery...... In Washington state authorities are gearing up for testing, contact tracing and quarantine efforts that will include children's "camps" in the name of fighting Covid-19..... More clashes tonight in the Mea Shearim neighborhood of Jerusalem as Orthodox Jewish residents sought to meet publicly in spite of Israeli government restrictions.... "Gestapo" was the message shouted at police in Lakewood, New Jersey Monday..... Police in Ukraine asking for the addresses of all the Jews in one community.... The family...

Libertarian activist Ammon Bundy praising the stand taken by a Washington state law enforcement officer over what what the officer sees as gross violations of Constitutional rights under the present coronavirus regime in the United States.... In northern Idaho's Kootenai County Ammon Bundy will be among the speakers at "Liberate America".... Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Israel being warned that they will be locked down tight again for holding religious bonfire observances last night..... Newborn babies and mothers among those killed in a terrorist attack on a hospital in Afghanistan's capital of Kabul today.... An Israeli soldier killed when a stone...

Well here we are in the Year of our Lord Anthony Fauci.....OK......well a set of songs ending with Noel Paul Stookey "wherever two or more are gathered...there is love" and we need "love" right now that reaches out to help others be free..... In Iowa yesterday a Republican photo op with VP Pence and GOP Governor Kim Reynolds, the GOP Senators Grassley and Ernst. They were with religious leaders and Iowa will allow regulated worship services that comply with social distancing and sanitary rules. The government regulating churches. That is so like China... And it was so like the USSR...the...

Another incident involving New York City police moving in on Orthodox Jewish mourners this afternoon. NYPD moving in to disperse a crowd and send away a vehicle carrying a coffin in Brooklyn's Borough Park neighborhood. The situation considered to be in violation of "social distancing" rules in the city leading to the police attempt to disperse the funeral.... Hundreds of protesters at Michigan's State Capitol in Lansing today demanding and end to the state of emergency declared over the coronavirus. Governor Gretchen Whitmer replaced a previous emergency order set to expire today with a new one that ends on May...

When I was around six years old they showed "The Outer Limits" on independent television from Channel 5 in Washington DC, now Fox 5. In those days we had over the air signals and in York, PA if you were high up the antenna brought in Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington DC signals etc. etc. etc. Right now DC 19 controls the horizontal but they are going to "restart the economy" and give us a "new normal" as they control the vertical. We will remain under control and restriction even if business is "reopened". Limits on people in buildings like restaurants...

This letter has been reposted with the permission of Rabbi Reuven Fink.As so many of us are now contemplating going into a Shabbos of seclusion, I want to share a few thoughts with you. We all woke up Tuesday morning prepared for our usual schedules of work or school or whatever we usually do. By late afternoon we learned that the state and the county health departments ordered a voluntary quarantine of those who were in a number of venues where the Coronavirus might have been. I said to myself, “but at all of those places we were performing mitzvot....

Jewish leaders in the U.K. have stated that they will oppose educational authorities and not allow their schools to teach about homosexual and other “lifestyles” that are “prohibited by the Torah.” Chinuch U.K., an organization that represents Britain’s main strictly Orthodox Jewish communities, has “issued a defiant challenge to the government by insisting their schools cannot discuss LGBT-related issues with pupils,” according to The Jewish Chronicle. The statement was reportedly prompted by recent visits to Jewish schools by government inspectors, who made it clear that primary schools have to teach children about LGBT “equality.” In 2018, Rabbi Mordechai Rose, who is...

Looking for some advice dealing with a horrid little kid. One of my younger daughters attends a non-Jewish secular STEM school in the USA. (It is about 1/4 Jewish.) She is a freshman. Very, very smart -- as in 1460 PSAT freshman smart, all high As, multilingual. GREAT athlete. With considerable reluctance, I allowed her to participate in a program where young ladies are "presented" in society. She looked lovely and frum. There is a young boy that has caused a bit of a trouble for her over the years. He's smart, father a bird colonel in the USAF, mother...

A British lawyer is accusing the German government of violating the country's constitution by refusing to restore the citizenship of thousands of people descended from victims of the Nazis. He argues that the law began to be misapplied under the lingering influence of former Nazis in the 1950s and 60s, and that it's still being misapplied today. James Strauss has lived all his life in New York but in the 1930s his family ran an inn and butcher's business in the town of Gunzenhausen, south of Nuremberg. It was here that an event known as the Bloody Palm Sunday pogrom...

Chuck Todd’s Sunday commentary on “Meet the Press” equating Trump supporters to Bible believers willing to embrace “fairy tales” is outrageous, displays an ignorance of the manuscript evidence for the authenticity of the Bible (“more than 25,000 partial and complete manuscript copies of the New Testament”), shows a dearth of understanding for the geological and historical evidence for a worldwide flood, and a lack of respect for and sensitivity to the millions of people – both Jews and Christians – who believe the biblical narrative is a true account of this catastrophe of immense proportions that went on to reshape...

If you've ever wondered what Judaism is, here is a list of its principle beliefs. This is not not an official list, but these beliefs have been widely held by religious Jews for thousands of years. As for my background, I have taught Judaism all of my life including two years as a member of the Brooklyn College Department of Judaic Studies; written two books and hundreds of articles on Judaism; and written two volumes -- Genesis and Exodus -- of a projected five-volume commentary on the Torah (called "The Rational Bible"). I am publishing this list because fewer and...

Vice President Mike Pence joins military officers and a chaplain on Aug. 23, 2019, in a prayer for two Army men who died during operations in Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen) (The Conversation) -- In 1919, Lee Levinger buried four soldiers in France. The responsibility to preside over a funeral was not unusual for military chaplains. But during World War I, most Americans would have been surprised to learn that a rabbi led a service for four Christian soldiers. In 1917, when the United States entered the war, chaplaincy was a majority white and fully Christian organization. No law specifically stated...

In 1951, Yiddish theater star Molly Picon, together with Jacob Kalich, her husband and fellow entertainer, and Cardinal Francis Joseph Spellman, the Vicar General of the United States Armed Forces, headed to Korea with a USO Christmas troupe. But as soon as Picon and Kalich stepped off the plane, a U.S. Army Chaplain ran up and asked if they could join 400 “boys” for Hanukkah. “Of course after flying 48 hours, we didn’t say no,” Kalich recalled in their 1971 interview for the William E. Wiener Oral History Library, held at the New York Public Library. “We started to give...

Along with giving out kipot to put on one’s head, Marc Daniels, a published author and the director of an independent marketing and consulting company, is also seeking to get wearers and non-wearers—from presidential candidates to others—to think about how people can come together amid modern-day divisiveness. It started back in 2015, when Daniels, 64, who grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, and now lives in the Illinois capital of Springfield, went to his first rally for then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. “I was trying to figure out a way to stand out in the crowd, and I took a kipah...

Not unlike the political divisions in America today, Judaism is equally divided. There are those that support Palestine as having rights beyond Isreal. And those that do not. Where do you stand?

He said it a Brooklyn press conference on Tuesday. Mayor Bill de Blasio, in addressing the increase in hate crimes in New York City under his watch, said, “I think the ideological movement that is anti-Semitic is the right-wing movement.” DeBlasio made the outrageous comments at a Brooklyn press conference on Tuesday. Anti-semitic incidents in 2019 are up 90 percent more than they were in June of 2018. A reporter had stated that there is also anti-Semitism “on the left – in the BDS movement around the world.” But Hizzoner the Mayor disagreed. He continued, “I want to be very,...

On midnight, MAY 14, 1948, the State of Israel came into being and was immediately recognized by the United States and the Soviet Union. A homeland for the thousands of Jews who were persecuted and displaced during World War II, Israel was attacked the next day by the Transjordanian Army, the Arab Legion, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. Against all odds, Israel survived. The Armistice between Israel and her enemies was negotiated by Ralph Bunche, the first African American to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1947, Ralph Bunche set up a meeting between two members of UNSCOP and Menachem...

The Motion Picture Association of America, the film industry’s board of review, today recommended the re-examination of the British made film ”Oliver Twist” with a view to having deletions and changes made which would remove objections to the firm voiced by many Jewish and other groups, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency learned today. (snip) In [the USA] the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith and other Jewish groups protested the scheduled showing of the film on the grounds that one of its central characters, Fagin, was portrayed in an anti-Semitic manner and would inspire anti-Jewish sentiment. In the British zone of Germany...