Growing up as a secular Jewish American, the horrors of the Holocaust overshadowed my world as one of the leading reasons my fellow Jews were not religious. Many of their parents or grandparents had abandoned observance because they could not come to terms with a God who would allow such atrocities to occur. Nearly every […]

The Child Victims Act went into effect last week. In January, after it passed, I wrote about how it’s good for Orthodox Jews because we have an entire Talmudic tractate dedicated to compensating damages, but we have no statute of limitations on bringing a claim against a perpetrator. We are commanded to surely pursue justice, but […]

I didn’t become observant through a kiruv organization. I became observant due to a search for meaning in life during my childhood. Thankfully, as I started to increase my observance at the end of high school, NCSY was there to give me a network of support and friends to help me acclimate into the Orthodox community. I […]

It was the best community. It was the worst community. It was a God of love. It was a God of terror. It was a school where children thrived. It was a school where children were abused. It was a time for exploring all the kosher parts of God’s glorious world, it was a time for everything […]

One of Us In November of 2017, my wife and I watched the movie “One of Us.” The Netflix documentary highlighted the stories of four people who were trying to leave the insular hasidic communities in the New York area and joined the Footsteps organization. The stories were touching, saddening, and confusing. The images I […]

Baruch C. Cohen, a Los Angeles civil litigation attorney, has taken a special interest in creating awareness in the community about the dangers of chillul Hashem, which literally means a “desecration of God’s name” and is used when a Jew does something that bring shames to Judaism. “I appear in court, state and federal, and […]