Ryan Torok

1 week ago | jewishjournal.com | Ryan Torok

Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of North America has named two Los Angeles residents to leadership positions in its western and southern regions. Rachel Charnick, a former Jewish Journal reporter who published under the name “Rachel Brand,” has been appointed the managing director of Hadassah West, while Lauren Rothman has been hired as managing director of Hadassah Super South. Together, the regions are home to 55,000 Hadassah members in almost 200 chapters across 26 states.

1 week ago | jewishjournal.com | Ryan Torok

Last Thursday night in Tel Aviv, Josh Goldberg was partying on a rooftop bar, celebrating his friend turning 31-years-old at midnight. But around 3 a.m. on Friday morning, the celebration came to abrupt halt. “We got a red alert while on the rooftop,” Goldberg said. After finding shelter in the bunker of a nearby corporate office building, Goldberg and his friends furiously scanned their phones to figure out what was happening.

1 week ago | jewishjournal.com | Ryan Torok

Los Angeles-based comedian Avi Liberman is the founder of Comedy for Koby, which brings comics to Israel to perform. The hope is the comedians will become ambassadors for Israel after being exposed to the on-the-ground realities in the Jewish state. While Liberman has made countless trips to Israel with other comedians, his latest one brought fresh challenges he’d yet to experience.

2 weeks ago | jewishjournal.com | Ryan Torok

Last month, the Shalom Institute, which operates a popular overnight summer camp that was destroyed in the 2018 Woolsey Fire, marked a new beginning during a hopeful event for its camp community. On May 18, Shalom Institute dedicated the following new spaces on its Alan D. Leve Campus in the Malibu mountains: its Annette M. Leve Amphitheater; Spatz Wunderlich Family Ropes Course and Adventure Center; and the Kaplan Family Nature Grove.

2 weeks ago | pjlibrary.org | Ryan Torok

By Ryan Torok This story appeared in the summer 2025 issue of PROOF, a PJ Library magazine. With Jewish museums, cultural centers, sports clubs, synagogues, day schools, and even the only kosher McDonald’s outside of Israel, Argentina is home to a thriving Jewish community — the largest in Latin America with about 180,000 members. But until last year, the community had limited access to a key resource: Jewish children’s books.