When he joined the National Council of Young Israel (NCYI) this past August as its Executive Director, Rabbi Perry Tirschwell hit the ground running. With his considerable experience in Jewish education and organizational life, Rabbi Tirschwell was tasked with overseeing and making Young Israel a transformative force in American Jewish life.

At the six-month

One of the advantages of the clocks being moved ahead one hour in the Spring (did I say it’s Spring? Hah!) is the extra hour we have to prepare for Shabbat. When my father passed away in 1993, Rabbi Jay Marcus, then of the Young Israel of Staten Island, lovingly referred to my father in Rav Soloveitchik’s parlance as an “Erev Shabbos Jew”—meaning, my

When 12 year-old Reina Amar, daughter of Ahrona and Alain Amar of Teaneck, visited Israel for the first time this summer, she was taken by the sheer number of chayalim she saw everywhere during her stay. Reina, a student at Ben Porat Yosef since nursery school, had often been taught both at school and at home about the value of Zionism and the importance of

We trained rigorously for months to build up our stamina and speed, and tapped all of our resources in Israel and at home to raise money. But on March 21 we saw the fruits of our labor pay off for the kids at the AMIT Beit Hayeled that we have grown to love over the course of our year at Midreshet AMIT. On that day we proudly joined over 50 other students on Team

Rabbi Hershel Schachter’s responsum concerning young women being permitted to wear tefillin in yeshiva schools is less troubling for its conclusion than it is for its attitude. Rabbi Schachter emphatically denies the right of reasonable rabbinic minds to disagree with him, charging that his students were out of bounds in making a decision on their own permitting

Although I would otherwise be hesitant to address a critique by non-Orthodox rabbis of an halachic ruling and the halachic methodology of one of our generation’s most preeminent roshei yeshiva and halachic decisors, the community’s broader need for an understanding and appreciation of the issues at hand compels a response.

Rabbis Ronald Price and Noah

A young teacher (YT) is interviewing with an assistant principal (AP) for a job teaching Tanach:

AP:Tell me, what do you believe are some goals of Jewish education?

YT:Well, there are a number of ideas that drive my teaching. First of all....

AP:Actually, forget that. Answer me this: A woman

Bergenfield—Areyvut, a non-profit based in Bergenfield, just began its bat mitzvah year. Founded in 2002, Areyvut’s mission is to infuse the lives of Jewish youth and teens with the core Jewish values of chesed, tzedakah, and tikkun olam. Areyvut’s fundamental belief is that sparking a passion for service inspires a lifelong commitment to social justice.

With Pesach quickly approaching and the annual ritual of cleaning our homes will shortly begin in earnest. Homemakers will meticulously clean, scrub and rid their homes of any and all unnecessary items that have accumulated over the course of the year. During this season a walk in Brooklyn will surely result in the sighting of “shaimos trucks”

Many memories come back to us this Shabbat as we recall Mordechai’s Chag HaSmicha celebration and the three and a half wonderful years that we lived at 501 W. 184 ^thStreet. We lived through the days when there was a “gorel,” a lottery to see who in smicha would go into the armed services.

At that time, Yeshiva University had an arrangement with

NEW YORK — The decision by the Orthodox Union (OU) to certify products that include kitniyot will have an immediate impact on grocery shelves this Passover season. Kitniyot, which is a category of food that contains legumes, corn, peas, soy, rice and lentils, is consumed by Jews of Sephardic descent while Ashkenazic Jews meticulously avoid the products. The

MIAMI BEACH—In one of the newest Publix stores located on Collins Avenue, a special Passover display was in place even before Purim. The display was just to the left of the main entrance on the second floor with a huge mountain of matzohs serving as the bookend to cake mixes, grape juice, chocolates and much more. This scene is repeated in some of the other stores of