June 13, 2026 | 27 Sivan 5786
Israeli Independence Day! The April 26 Yom HaAtzmaut event in Milwaukee featured a torch from Israel.
A grassroots effort of local volunteers is cutting and crocheting plastic bags into mats for the homeless. It’s a triple mitzvah – serving the homeless, reusing plastic bags to benefit the environment, and bringing together different groups in the Jewish community. The mats are called “Mercy Mats” and are made of crocheted plastic grocery bags. They offer warmth and are less apt to get muddled with water and mold for people who are unhoused and need a portable mattress. In recent […]
Have the conversations, collect the information, and make choices before end of life You don’t want to read this. You probably should. Those who work with grieving families agree: Preplanning is so much better, well before we get to those terrible days of pain and confusion, when a loved one passes away. You can create a written plan at […]
Rabbis and funeral directors: please talk about end-of-life plans beforehand Rabbi Gil-Ezer Lerer, spiritual leader of Temple Menorah in Milwaukee, has seen it too many times. The family is scrambling. They don’t know who to call. They call him: “What are we supposed to do?” He asks: “Do you have any arrangements?” “No, we never really wanted to.” “My dad didn’t want to talk about it.” “My sister […]
It’s not what you might expect Say you are having a casual conversation with someone who probably doesn’t know you are Jewish. That has happened to me many times. My name and appearance doesn’t fit our stereotypes. You are discussing current events, and the conversation gets to rising gas prices and how long that might last. And they start to tell you that the Iran war […]
MILWAUKEE — Confirmed antisemitic incidents in Wisconsin surged to 174 in 2025, an 83% increase from 2024 to 2025, according to the 2025 Audit of Antisemitic Incidents released in late May by the Jewish Community Relations Council of Milwaukee Jewish Federation. This sharp increase marks 2025 as a statistically distinct year and signals a troubling shift in the […]
In his last weeks leading Congregation Sinai, Rabbi David Cohen delivered opening prayer We remember the six million Jews murdered during the Shoah and honor the survivors. In the last weeks of his service as spiritual leader for Congregation Sinai in Fox Point, before stepping away for other pursuits, Rabbi David Cohen led the opening prayer at the Milwaukee-area Yom HaShoah commemoration on April 12. The […]
Juneteenth demands honesty from us, especially in Milwaukee Juneteenth marks a delayed freedom. More than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, on June 19, 1865, enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, were finally informed that they were free. It is a holiday that resists easy celebration. It reminds us that freedom in the United States has never arrived all […]
As Rabbi David Cohen steps away, Jacobsen embraces a new beginning that she didn’t see coming “It all started with meeting a nice Jewish boy,” said Rabbi Ora Jacobsen. “My husband!” Jacobsen started as Congregation Sinai’s new Rabbi this month, but becoming a Jewish professional was not her original plan. She was not born into a Jewish […]
From the halls of Congress to a public conversation with Wisconsin’s Holocaust center director Award-winning author and history professor Pamela S. Nadell has testified about antisemitism before the U.S. Congress three times, she said in a congressional testimony on Dec. 5, 2023. “The first was in 2017, just three months after white supremacists chanting ‘Jews will not replace us’ paraded through the University of […]
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