Woman's memoir lifts lid on New York Chasidic life

A woman who has renounced her Chasidic background is set to send shockwaves around New York's strictly Orthodox community after writing a tell-all memoir about her upbringing.

Deborah Feldman turned her back on life in Brooklyn's Satmar community two years ago, after being pushed into an arranged marriage at 17 years old and becoming a mother at the age of 20.

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Super Bowl bet winner giving money to charity

An Orthodox Jewish sports fan who won $50,000 on a bet before the Super Bowl has announced that he will donate the money to charity.

New Yorker Jona Rechnitz is a lifelong fan of the Giants, and decided to place a $1,000 bet on his team before the biggest match in the American football calendar.

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Shul Crawl: Lubavitch World Headquarters, New York

The USA may be a bit beyond our remit of "every synagogue in the UK" but we thought we'd go and see what all the fuss was about.

We visited the Lubavitch (Chabad) Headquarters, situated at 770 Eastern Parkway, in a borough of New York City.

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How a New York visit made me more aware of home

In vain, we searched for the pickle shop. Wandering around New York's historic Lower East Side, it seemed improbable, impossible even, that we wouldn't encounter a Yiddish-speaking man selling barrels of flavoursome and juicy cucumbers and telling us we had chutzpah when we tried to negotiate a good deal.

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Brooklyn women fight to join Orthodox ambulance service

A group of Orthodox women in the Borough Park area of New York have sparked a debate in the community after they asked to be allowed to join a men-only Jewish volunteer ambulance service.

The women said they wanted to be involved in Hatzalah's operations, in order to help women going into labour or facing other emergencies.

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New York education in Finchley synagogue

Four students from New York’s Yeshiva University presented 10 learning events for women at Finchley Synagogue over the Simchat Torah weekend.

Chavi Becker, Kira Joel, Shlomit Cohen and Derora Tropp also led the women’s dancing in synagogue during the festival.

The well-attended activities ranged from interactive Torah study to learning-based afternoon teas in members’ homes.

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Brooklyn's gender-separated bus to change its policy

A bus service that required male and female passengers to sit separately for religious reasons will no longer operate under that arrangement.

It emerged last week that women who took the B110 bus through a part of Brooklyn that is home to high numbers of Chasidic Jews were being told to sit at the back of the vehicle.

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Service as usual at New York Durban conference

Durban III, the UN’s third “anti-racism” conference in New York last month proved to be the exercise in Israel-bashing that everyone had expected.
It served as the podium for the Lebanese and Syrian foreign ministers to charge that the very concept of “a Jewish state” is “an act of racism”.

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Yom Kippur the Occupy Wall Street way

More than 300 people have said they will attend a Kol Nidre service in the middle of what may be the biggest protest to hit New York City in decades.

The Yom Kippur service at the Occupy Wall Street site has been organised on Facebook by Daniel Sieradski, a digital entrepreneur who founded a website enabling people to customise prayer books and Haggadot.

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New York is paralysed

The first week of the General Assembly is always crazy in New York. World leaders stream into the city from every continent, hotels double their prices and motorcades speed around the city, paralysing the traffic.

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