Sunday night, as I lit the first candle of the Menorah, I thought about my personal journey of performing this incredible commandment with pride and joy. My story begins in 1982 in Odessa, Ukraine, which at the time was controlled by the Soviet Union. I was raised in a traditional Soviet family at a time […]

A Boxing Promoter’s Trickiest Move Is Observing the Sabbath Dmitriy Salita, a 37-year-old former welterweight, is the rare Orthodox Jew in big-time boxing and, as such, he observes the Sabbath. From sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, he adheres to the faith’s prohibitions on phones, television or internet, and perhaps most difficult for his line of […]

  We’ve all heard of baseball legends Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax not playing the World Series on Yom Kippur. More recently, LA Dodger Shawn Green sat out on the holiest day of the Jewish year. Despite the famous joke from “Airplane” about the lack of Jewish athletes in history, there are actually hundreds of […]