Free Republic

The Cohen family was on very good terms with their Roman Catholic neighbours, the O'Briens. In fact, little Yaakov Cohen and Christopher O'Brien from next door would play together from time to time. Or at least they used to. Well, one late December's day, Duncan O'Brien came storming in to the Cohen's house holding poor Yaakov by the ear. "Your son is not going near my Chris again; he just has no respect for us and our religion!" "What's the matter; what did he do?" enquired Mr. Cohen. "I'll tell you" said Duncan "he saw our Christmas tree and started...

Without warning, Twitter suspended a series of three accounts owned by an Orthodox Jew from New York City Wednesday and Thursday, after one of them tweeted a cartoon depicting the Obama administration stabbing Israel in the back. The social media company refused to tell The Daily Caller if the cartoon was the reason it shut the accounts down. Twitter also wouldn’t say why it hasn’t taken similar action against the terror group Hamas and its supporters for tweeting “Death to the Jews” and other threats of violence. The suspended accounts, named @RealGazaPeace, @RealGazaPeace1 and @GazaRealStory, were all operated by 25-year-old...

In 2008, Barack Obama stole a chunk of religious voters from the GOP by clothing his secularist and socialist positions in quasi-religious garb.“People of faith” received their own slot on his campaign web site, a mere two tabs down from the “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender community.” Obama “valued” the religious, as he put it. He particularly valued their votes. Obama has long believed in the separation of church and state but not in the separation of bogus religiosity from winning.This year his pitch to the religious is a little more tricky in light of the HHS mandate and other...

BERLIN (Reuters) - A leading member of Germany's Jewish community had to point to a gun he was carrying to ward off a young man shouting anti-Semetic abuse, the latest in a string of racist incidents in Berlin that has shocked Jews and city authorities.

Go to URL and watch video [watch from 1:00 for the actual incident] An Israeli traffic police volunteer was documenting an arab traffic offender after he spotted him driving recklessly and crossing over a white line. Realizing he's being filmed, this punk pulls out an iron pipe with the intention of beating him up, but the volunteer brings him back to his senses by pulling out a gun.

NEW DELHI, India (JTA) -- Lt. Gen. Jack Jacob, a national hero in India for likely saving hundreds of thousands of lives, is planning to fade away. “I’ve just had my 89th birthday,” he says, “I think I’ve earned the right to rest.” So Jacob, India’s “top-ranking Jew,” stayed home on his recent birthday, preferring to be alone in his modest New Delhi flat while enjoying his birthday cake, a special delivery from Nachum’s -- Calcutta’s famous Jewish Bakery and now among the last of the once many Jewish-owned establishments in the city. Sitting on his golden brocade sofas --...

Although I am a native Chicagoan who has lived in the city for many years apparently I am not a good citizen according to our mayor, Rahm Emanuel (D). By his description, I lack Chicago values. Guilty! I am so respectful of my fellow neighbors and other residents that I have never murdered any of them nor have I bribed any city, county or state employee, all standard behavior and practices in our city. I also believe in the US Constitution, including the sections guaranteeing the free exercise of religion and freedom of speech which, according to the mayor and...

Note: The following laws are based on Ashkenazi tradition, and some points are subject to varying opinion. When in doubt, AYLOR (ask your local Orthodox rabbi)1. What are the main changes when Tisha B'Av falls on Shabbat or Sunday?When Tisha B'Av falls on Shabbat, the main changes are: The fast is postponed until Sunday.Bathing is permitted on Rosh Chodesh.Marital relations are forbidden on Friday night.Washing any part of the body with hot water is forbidden on Shabbat. When Tisha B'Av falls on Shabbat or Sunday, the main changes are: There is no special Seuda Hamafseket before the fast.Some of...

The ordination took place on a sun-drenched Sabbath, in a synagogue used many decades ago by Lithuanian Jews. But on June 23, it was 200 mostly black worshippers, many in brightly colored African dress, who were on their feet, eyes fixed on a procession of eight white-robed rabbis with ceremonial miters crowning their heads as they strode, single file, down the aisle separating the men’s and women’s seating...For many mainstream Jews, this is a ceremony that might seem alien. But today, the differences between them and these black Jews, who have long been ignored or dismissed as inauthentic by the...

A Bluffton Middle School teacher is accused of grabbing a student by his shirt collar, forcing him under a desk and telling him, "This is what the Nazis do to Jews," according to the Bluffton Police Department. Patricia Mulholland, a social studies teacher at the school, was arrested at 5:45 a.m. today and charged with third-degree assault and battery, and public disorderly conduct, according to the Beaufort County Detention Center log. Contacted today, Beaufort County School District spokesman Jim Foster said details about the alleged incident Wednesday were not immediately available but that he expected to provide information later in...

Update: The pictures can no longer be accessed through Facebook. Screen captures can be found below. The Democratic Party’s newly appointed Jewish outreach liaison is pictured on Facebook in a series of provocative photos with her friends holding dollar bills and referring to themselves as “Jewbags” and the “Jew cash money team.” Dani Gilbert, who has been a staffer in the office of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D., Fla.), was recently appointed as the Democratic National Committee’s Jewish outreach liaison, according to her Twitter feed. Photos publicly available on her Facebook page depict her engaged in the kind of youthful...

<p>Security has been tightened at Jewish schools in Sweden after the murder of three children and a teacher at a Jewish school in France is suspected to be the work of a serial killer.</p> <p>"We have raised it (security) a little extra in places where we have children and young people," Lena Posner-Koeroesi, who heads the Official Council of Swedish Jewish Communities, told the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper.</p>

Jewish scholars provide insights that could advance knowledge, dialogue between the Church and JudaismOver the years I have used many different commentaries, study Bibles and related reference works. The majority of these helpful texts have been written by Catholic scholars, with numerous others produced by Protestant publishers, along with a few from Eastern Orthodox writers. And in my studies of the Old Testament, I have used several works by Jewish scholars. But until now, there hasn’t been a volume quite like “The Jewish Annotated New Testament” (Oxford University Press, $35), a work, as the co-editors note in their preface, that...

IN A COLUMN many years ago, I described how I once attempted to chart a family tree. Most of my father’s family had been killed in Auschwitz, and my efforts to trace their genealogy left me, I wrote, with a family tree that “has stumps where branches ought to be’’ and “gets narrower, not wider, as it grows.’’ A woman phoned me the morning that column appeared. She said she was a Mormon, and wanted to add the names of my father’s massacred relatives — the column had mentioned about 18 of them by name — to the Mormon Church’s...

On CNN's Sunday show State of the Union, anchor Candy Crowley again brought tough questions to a Democrat about President Obama's plan to impose on a burden on Catholic-affiliated schools, hospitals, and charities to subsidize contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients. New chief of staff Jacob Lew was asked if as an observant Jew, "was there anything about this that made you think twice when it first went out?" Lew athletically dodged that question. Crowley also asied if he could say "with a straight face that the insurance company's going to pick up the cost of this"? Lew dodged that as well.

It is a rare moment indeed when faith denominations of all stripes unite together in common cause, and it is rarer still when that cause is a political one, with a sole piece of legislation as its principal target. But when that law eviscerates the very foundation of religious liberty in America as protected under the First Amendment, it should not be surprising that Catholics and Jews, evangelical Christians, and mainline Lutherans alike find common cause in defense of their liberties.Such is the case with the firestorm of opposition to Obamacare and the Obama Administration’s attack on religious liberty. Under...

Is European anti-Semitism different today or is there a feeling that we've been here before? The term déjà vu brings to mind the English expression, been there, done that. The odd sensation of reliving something for the second time unnerves us precisely because it’s so convincingly familiar. Over the course of 2 months, I visited Jewish communities in the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France, Belgium and the UK and interviewed dozens of Jewish leaders as well as “laymen” – both Jews and non-Jews. While attempting to determine the seriousness of contemporary European Anti-Semitism, I experienced what I would term “déjà...

The news from northern New Jersey this week was not good. Several Molotov cocktails and other incendiary devices were thrown at Congregation Beth El in Rutherford early on the morning of Jan. 11, igniting a fire in the second-floor bedroom of the rabbi’s residence above the synagogue. This was the fourth anti-Semitic incident in Bergen County within a three-week period. A fire was intentionally set at a synagogue in Paramus and anti-Semitic graffiti was discovered at synagogues in Hackensack and Maywood. The Rutherford incident is being classified as a bias crime and attempted murder. The Bergen County prosecutor said there...

On Monday, Palestinian Media Watch posted on YouTube a video showing the Mufti of the 'Palestinian Authority,' Muhammad Hussein, presenting the killing of Jews as a religious goal. Last week, the principal Palestinian Authority religious leader, the Mufti Muhammad Hussein, presented the killing of Jews by Muslims as a religious Islamic goal. At an event celebrating the 47th anniversary of the founding of Fatah, he cited the Hadith (Islamic tradition attributed to Muhammad) saying that the Hour of Resurrection will not come until Muslims fight the Jews and kill them: "The Hour [of Resurrection] will not come until you fight...

More arrests, more destruction, more annihilationists by the occupy destroy movement exalted my the media and left wing goons. Thousands of arrests, rapes, rape tents, murders, arson, Jew hatred, the stuff of left wing lunatic love. But the enemeida despised, slandered, and smeared the pro-America Tea Party, million of peaceful activists, no arrests, no crime, no racism.... and the media's knee jerk hatred of the good for being the good. From coast to coast the #owsoccupiers were on the warpath when the new year rang in. Target, America. In New York: Some 800 Occupy Wall Street protesters began the new...