“So there is this wonderful speaker that is coming to our community, I think you should come tonight and hear her. She talks about what its like to be an Orthodox Jew in the City.” Ugh, why would I want to go and hear a speaker like that, I say to myself.  To be fair […]

Last Saturday night, after three days of being off-line due to Rosh Hashana and Shabbos, I powered up my iPhone, and the emails started flooding in. Apparently during the holiday a story broke about a pre-Rosh Hashana El Al flight to Israel (LY4) which took off from JFK and was full of Hasidic men who refused to […]

As I write these words, our brothers in Israel have entered Gaza to weed out terrorists. This mission is occurring during the Three Weeks – a time of mourning over the destruction of our Temple which begins on the 17th of Tammuz and ends on Tisha B’Av. We are told that the Second Temple was […]

A couple weeks ago we started an initiative to address an issue we were hearing more and more about: ex-Haredi Jews who want to remain observant but who don’t feel welcome or know how to fit into the non-Haredi Orthodox Jewish world. One of our advisors – a person who is a lot more rational […]

There is a story told about the late rabbi and physicist Aryeh Kaplan: As a teenager he began to explore Orthodox Judaism and spent a short time in yeshiva. After his brief stint, he wasn’t so convinced that observant life was for him, so he decided to leave. But he was a bit nervous as […]