It was the month of January 2005. That Saturday night, a 17-year-old girl, by the name of Ayala Abukasis, was walking home with her younger brother, Tamir, in the southern city of Sderot in Israel. As they were walking, Ayala heard the shrill of an incoming Qassam missile fired from Gaza unto her city. She

News of last week’s terror attack — and that’s what it was — at the Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church that left nine dead during a Bible study session has rightfully yielded both our outrage and our sorrow. In the African American community it has sounded echoes of the bleakest days of the 1960s. In the Jewish community, it called to mind

Today in the Middle East, there is a revolution against secularism of two different kinds. The first is the secular nationalism of Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak in Egypt, Assad in Syria and Saddam Hussein in Iraq – all regimes widely seen to be corrupt and oppressive. The second is the secular culture of the West,

Jewish leaders are pressuring Mayor de Blasio to provide NYPD school safety agents at religious schools, with a letter signed by 24 city rabbis sent to Hizzoner on Monday. The rabbis urged de Blasio to support Intro 65, a school-safety bill in City Council that would allow religious schools to request safety agents for their

In Judaism, we are accustomed to counting down (or up) toward a deadline: the 49 days of the Omer leading to Shavuot and the Asseret Yemai Teshuvah leading to Yom Kippur, to name two. Right now, we’re counting down to another deadline that could have a significant impact for Jewish day school parents and all

In this first person Op-Ed, Tom Tugend of the Jewish Telegraph Agency describes his experience as a foreign volunteer during Israel’s War of Independence: In May 1948, I was walking down Market Street in San Francisco when I passed a small movie theater with a marquee that announced “The Jews Fight for Their State.” For the

As Jews around the world prepare to celebrate the holiday of Shavuot commemorating the acceptance of the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai, we are profoundly disturbed by the resurgence of global anti-Semitism. What seems not sufficiently understood is the deep connection between these two, Sinai and anti-Semitism. The link between the two can allow us

Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein zt”l, who passed away on Monday at the age of 81 was laid to rest earlier today in Har Hamenuchot in Jerusalem. An archived version of the hespedim from the levaya is available for watching: Read English translations of the hespedim. Nathan Diament, executive director of the OU Advocacy Center and a

As the world’s largest kosher food certification agency, we at the Orthodox Union know a few things about inspection programs. Our “OU” logo is on nearly one million food products made in more than 90 countries, and some age-old Jewish rules about kosher supervision are relevant to the current debate over the proposed Iran nuclear