AFTER 70 YEARS, THE UNITED NATIONS RECOGNIZES YOM KIPPUR AS AN OFFICIAL HOLIDAY

By Yair Rosenberg for Tablet Magazine   

On Friday, 70 years after its founding, the United Nations finally recognized the holiest day of the Jewish calendar as an official holiday. The designation ensures that no official meetings will take place on Yom Kippur, and that U.N. employees can choose not to work on it. Previously, Jews who wished to observe the penitential fast day were given no such dispensation, even as New York—the home of the U.N. headquarters—had long declared Yom Kippur to be a school holiday.

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Was Dead Man Too Jewish To Be Cremated?

Josh Nathan-Kazis for The Jewish Daily Forward   

When Martin Mendelsohn died in September, his brother’s plans to have the remains cremated ran into some surprising opposition: The Hasidic owner of the dead man’s retirement home sued to have the body buried instead.

Philip Schonberger, who runs the Evergreen Court Home for Adults, in Spring Valley, New York, thought Mendelsohn’s brother, Steven, was making a terrible mistake by opting for cremation.

“Why would a person who loved Judaism and practiced to the best of his ability want to be cremated?” Schonberger said. Cremation is strictly banned under Orthodox law.

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The Russian Jewish Ethnographer Behind A Trove of Stunning Historic Photographs

By Leah Falk for Jewniverse

The Vitebsk-born Shloyme Zaynvi Rapoport — better known by the moniker S. An-sky — was many things: publisher, playwright, tutor. But his most enduring legacy is twofold: his play The Dybbuk, which comprises what most people know of Yiddish literature outside the Singer family, and the exhaustive ethnographic expedition that inspired that play. With the expedition, An-sky aspired to chronicle the entirety of Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement in the early 1900s.

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Why Jews Used to Spit in Shul

By Zachary Solomon for Jewniverse   
The list of what you cannot do in a synagogue is prodigious—from clapping and smoking to futzing with the change in your pocket. But what you won’t find on that list is spitting. In fact, in many Orthodox congregations, spitting is quite encouraged, and we can thank a certain prayer for that.

Aleinu, the prayer that marks the end of the daily prayer services, is an intense one: the first paragraph praises God, “who has not made us like the nations of the world…who has not designed our destiny to be like theirs…for they bow to vanity and emptiness and pray to a god who cannot save.”

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