New Jersey Jewish News

The New Jersey Jewish News (NJJN) is a weekly publication brought to you by the United Jewish Communities (UJC) of MetroWest New Jersey. It's important to note that the editorial content of the newspaper operates independently from UJC, and the opinions shared in its articles do not necessarily reflect the views of UJC.

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Articles

‘Resilience - it’s like in the water here’

1 week ago | njjewishnews.timesofisrael.com | Joanne Palmer

Rachel Lissack grew up in South Orange, but she’s a Tel Avivian now. That move around the world to the place that she feels very deeply is her home wasn’t the result of carefully laid plans as much as an inevitable response to an undeniable pull. “The air feels different here,” she said. So now that Israel is under attack, she’s living the same balancing attack as most other Israelis, she said. “Day to day, it’s obviously not nice, there is some fear, but there’s also a need for balance.
Searching for peace, finding no peace

1 week ago | njjewishnews.timesofisrael.com | Joanne Palmer

It’s hard to know what to say this week, because it’s all too obvious or too terrifying or simply too sad.
‘I’ve never felt like this before’

1 week ago | njjewishnews.timesofisrael.com | Joanne Palmer

You know how we often hear that Jewish summer camp can change a kid’s life? Jordyn Engel knows that’s true. It’s not the only thing that took her from a happy childhood and adolescence in Springfield to where she is now, a combat medic in the IDF. Covid factors in as well, as well as some very smart parenting. Ms. Engel, who is 23, one of three sisters — the others are Rachel and Samara — went to public school and became bat mitzvah at Temple Sha’arey Shalom in Springfield.
‘Thank God, the kids are very resilient’

1 week ago | njjewishnews.timesofisrael.com | Joanne Palmer

When the sirens go off, the family just has to go to his 17-year-old daughter’s bedroom, Rabbi Ely Allen said. That’s the family’s mamad — its safe room — in Ramat Beit Shemesh. “That can be scary,” Rabbi Allen said; he didn’t mean the sirens, but the 17-year-old girl-ness of the room. “Fortunately, I work with young people, so I remember what it’s like.”Seriously, though, he and his family do feel safe at home, but “we have relatives who live in Haifa and Bat Yam Rishon.
‘We’re all in this together’

1 week ago | njjewishnews.timesofisrael.com | Joanne Palmer

Elie Y. Katz loves being in Israel. But now it’s time for him to come home. Mr. Katz, a lifelong Teaneck resident who’s been a member of the town council for just about half his life and now is its deputy mayor, was in Israel with his family for a wedding. “That was last Monday,” he said. “We were supposed to go home on Sunday night.”But no.
A lion doesn’t concern himself with the opinion of sheep

1 week ago | njjewishnews.timesofisrael.com | Joanne Palmer

‘A few weeks ago, in ‘Where is the Ring of Power,’ we discussed the potential of an Israeli attack against Iran,” Alexander Smukler of Montclair said. Mr. Smukler, our war analyst, who spent half his life in the Soviet Union and left there just before it imploded, with a hard-earned understanding of dictatorships and how to fight against them, wasn’t bragging.
‘We act with respect for a body that housed a soul’

2 weeks ago | njjewishnews.timesofisrael.com | Abigail Klein Leichman

Anna Chosak of West Orange is a graphic designer. She’s also a member of the Garden State Chevra Kadisha. This voluntary “holy society” — that’s the literal translation from Aramaic — prepares bodies for burial according to Jewish law and tradition. “My father was a homicide detective, and I always heard his crazy stories and was taken to funerals, so death was never a big scary thing to me,” Ms. Chosak said. “It was part of life. “Most people are uncomfortable with death, but I never was.
Selling art, feeding the hungry

2 weeks ago | njjewishnews.timesofisrael.com | Joanne Palmer

Most of us know the cultural tropes about the tormented artist. The writer who stalks around his typewriter, plunking out two or three words (it’s always a man, never a woman, and the machine is never a computer, or a word processor, or even a Selectric but always a from-the-dawn-of-time typewriter), then noisily tearing the sheet out of the contraption, crumpling it up, and throwing it into a corner, presumably to be picked up by the invisible maid or long-suffering wife.
Can an Iranian fight an Israeli?

2 weeks ago | njjewishnews.timesofisrael.com | Curt Schleier

The film “Tatami” is co-directed by an Israeli and an Iranian. This is the first time that’s ever happened. Its dialogue is almost entirely in Farsi. And it is about an international championship competition in the comparatively obscure sport of judo. Yet the mix of these disparate elements implausibly has resulted in the most exciting and suspenseful of political thrillers, a film that has the potential and quite frankly deserves to be the breakout hit of the year.
It’s summertime

2 weeks ago | njjewishnews.timesofisrael.com | Banji Ganchrow

In previous columns I have reminisced about how, when you have kids at home, the changing of the seasons is defined by what activities they have. For example, you know it is fall when they have soccer, and you are watching them play in the freezing cold, long after the sun has gone down. And you know it is summer when you start buying supplies for camp. Lots and lots of socks and underwear. The newest style of t-shirt-dry fit, cotton… With boys it was always easy and never that exciting.