Each year in the 1940s and ’50s, more than 15,000 Americans were paralyzed by polio and thousands died. The disease reached its peak in the United States in 1952, leaving 3,145 Americans dead …
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By Heather Robinson, JNS
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8/19/20
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More than 350 years ago, a plague took a deadly toll on Hamburg, Germany. As the High Holidays approached, fear and panic set in and many of the city’s Jewish families fled.
Among them were …
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By Penny Schwartz, JTA
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7/28/20
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As America’s battle with the novel coronavirus raged, no age group has been as widely affected as the elderly, making nursing homes, assisted-living facilities and senior residences ground zero …
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By Heather Robinson, JNS
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7/15/20
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The sobs came over the phone as Michael Beer described his father Ira’s lifelong commitment to Torah study and his family.
A victim of the COVID-19 pandemic that has killed hundreds of …
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Speaking Personally, by Sam Sokol, JTA
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7/15/20
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Nothing better illustrates Thomas Mann’s famous statement that “everything is politics” than the response of opposing ideological camps to their government’s handling of …
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By Ruthie Blum
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7/9/20
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The coronavirus pandemic raised a series of deep moral and political issues. How far should governments go in seeking to prevent its spread? To what extent should they restrict people’s …
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By Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks
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7/9/20
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It was just two months ago that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared victory over the new coronavirus.
Ten weeks after recording its first cases, Israel had imposed …
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By Sam Sokol, JTA
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7/9/20
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If you want to pray, don’t throw your mask away. And keep your distance!
That’s the message voiced over the weekend by Rabbi Dr. Aaron Glatt, chief of infectious diseases at Mount …
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By Ed Weintrob
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7/9/20
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Tamara Boronina, an 82-year-old Holocaust survivor living in Ukraine, can barely afford her small Odessa apartment on her monthly pension of $65.
She is a widow whose only daughter died in 1999. …
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By Cnaan Liphshiz, JTA
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7/3/20
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The coronavirus pandemic has done something that no war, natural disaster or other calamity has been able to do for more than 50 years: It’s put a stop to stage performances of “Fiddler …
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By Stephen Silver, JTA
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7/2/20
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