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the challenge for Jared Kushner, and everyone in our extraordinarily privileged generation, is to remember our ancestors’ suffering and honor their memories by defending the weak, vulnerable and oppressed today.

Slavery, in other words, was meant to ensure that Jews would remember powerlessness once they gained power. Jared Kushner is what happens when that memory fails.

How could Kushner — a Modern Orthodox golden boy — fail to internalize that? How could he invite Donald Trump’s Cabinet to his house for Shabbat dinner only hours after his father-in-law’s executive order banning refugees from entering the United States? How could he pose in a tuxedo alongside his wife, Ivanka Trump, on Saturday night as that executive order wreaked havoc on innocent people’s lives simply because they hailed from the wrong countries?

Yet despite his seeming detachment from worldly life, Rabbi Kanievsky has become one of the most consequential and controversial people in Israel today.

The spiritual leader of hundreds of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews, Rabbi Kanievsky has landed at the center of tensions over the coronavirus between the Israeli mainstream and its growing ultra-Orthodox minority.

Throughout the pandemic, the authorities have clashed with the ultra-Orthodox over their resistance to antivirus protocols, particularly their early refusal to close schools or limit crowds at religious events

In Israel and the U.S., this isolated community is thriving. The coronavirus pandemic has shown why this may be its biggest problem.

Some of the schools refused, and the governor threatened as a consequence to withhold state funding.

At about the same time in Israel, a rabbi commanded his followers to open ultra-Orthodox schools, in defiance of government shutdown orders. Israel’s health minister warned these schools that they could face “heavy fines.”

In the New York City area, for example, the Orthodox make up 32 percent of Jews over all. But the Orthodox make up 61 percent of Jewish children. Because the Orthodox are so fertile, in a few years, they will be the dominant group in New York Jewry.

For the people who shop at Pomegranate, the collective covenant with God is the primary reality and obedience to the laws is the primary obligation. They go shopping like the rest of us, but their shopping is minutely governed by an external moral order.

The laws are gradually internalized through a system of lifelong study, argument and practice. The external laws may seem, at first, like an imposition, but then they become welcome and finally seem like a person’s natural way of being.

It is clear by now that Russia’s government has dug in against outside intervention in Syria, its longtime partner and last firm foothold in the Middle East. Less well known is the position taken by the Russian Orthodox Church, which fears that Christian minorities, many of them Orthodox, will be swept away by a wave of Islamic fundamentalism unleashed by the Arab Spring.

This argument for supporting sitting leaders has reached a peak around Syria, whose minority population of Christians, about 10 percent, has been reluctant to join the Sunni Muslim opposition against Mr. Assad, fearing persecution at those same hands if he were to fall. If the church’s advocacy cannot be said to guide Russia’s policy, it is one of the factors that make compromise with the West so elusive, especially at a time of domestic political uncertainty for the Kremlin.

The issue of “Christianophobia” shot to the top of the church’s agenda a year ago, with a statement warning that “they are killing our brothers and sisters, driving them from their homes, separating them from their near and dear, stripping them of the right to confess their religious beliefs

An ultra-Orthodox Jewish newspaper in Israel appears to have edited out female world leaders from a photograph of Sunday's anti-terrorism rally in Paris, Israeli media reported.

Israeli site Walla!, however, noted that when ultra-Orthodox paper HaMevaser (The Announcer) ran the iconic photo, female leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo were all of a sudden missing from the scene.

In fact, it's not the first time in recent years that an ultra-Orthodox publication has cut a female leader from a photo in its print. The New York-based paper Di Tzeitung decided in 2011 to erase then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from the image showing American leaders during the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound, The Telegraph noted.

Pope Francis will meet the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kyril, next Friday in Cuba, the Vatican announced Friday.

It will be the first meeting between the heads of the Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches in history. The Eastern Orthodox and Western factions of Christianity broke apart during the Great Schism in 1054.

The meeting will come less than a year after Francis' first visit to Cuba as Pope. He played a key role in the recent thawing of relations between the United States and Cuba, which reestablished diplomatic ties last year.

In Historic Move, Pope to Meet With Leader of Russian Orthodox Church

the first meeting between a pope and the Russian patriarch since the eastern and western branches of Christianity split nearly 1,000 years ago

it is another important milestone in his efforts to reconcile the Roman Catholic Church with Eastern Orthodox churches.

even as Bannon and various religious leaders seek to pit the values of Christianity against those of Islam, there is also an internal competition to decide who gets to define Christian traditionalism.

Two of the main players in this competition, American Christian traditionalists—including conservative Catholics like Bannon as well as evangelicals like Franklin Graham—and Russian Orthodox, are united in their desire to save Christendom from the perceived threat of radical Islam. But buried underneath that superficial agreement is a complex disagreement as to what Christendom even means.

In Bannon’s telling, the greatest mistake the baby boomers made was to reject the traditional “Judeo-Christian” values of their parents. He considers this a historical crime, because in his telling it was Judeo-Christian values that enabled Western Europe and the United States to defeat European fascism, and, subsequently, to create an “enlightened capitalism” that made America great for decades after World War II.

Soon after the May 1948 birth of the state of Israel, a meeting took place between David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, and Rabbi Avraham Yeshayahu Karelitz, a leading religious figure and head of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox (in Hebrew, Haredi) community. The result was the Status Quo Agreement, which charted two parallel lines: one for Jewish Israelis at large, whether secular or religious, the other tailored to the needs of Haredi Jews in particular.

Over the decades, the former “line” helped Jewish Israelis flourish in a modern state. The Haredi line restored the fortunes of a special religious world that, after being nearly destroyed in the Holocaust, was re-established. That world was upgraded with such institutions as Torah academies, synagogues, and Hasidic courts; in various subsects and religious activities; and in whole Haredi municipalities.

According to their political leaders, most Haredim hope to sustain their religiously devout and socially reclusive lives permanently under the protection of their longstanding civic exemptions. The rest of Israel demands and expects full participation.

The head of the Roman Catholic Church and the head of the Russian Orthodox Church are to meet for the first time in nearly 1,000 years tomorrow.

Great Schism on mend: Pope, Orthodox leader to show solidarity in visit with refugees in limbo in Greece

“It’s amazing that this awakening of civic consciousness has affected the church as well, and not just lay people but clergy, too,” Sergei Chapnin, editor of the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, said last week, on the sidelines of a seminar about Russia’s historical identity

the reaction inside the church arose from disgust at official dishonesty surrounding the election. “A Christian has to protest against lies, especially lies to millions of people,

He said clergy members were speaking out because they saw vote-rigging and fraud as violations of the Ten Commandments.

MOSCOW — The Kremlin plans to sit out the centenary of the Russian Revolution.

There will be no national holiday on Sunday, March 12, the date generally recognized as the start of the uprising. Nor will there even be a government-issued official interpretation, like the one mandating that World War II was a “Great Victory.”

In comparison, the Kremlin has turned World War II into the apogee of national unity.

Hardship has long been common here — and still is. But in just four years, the country has gone from the European Union’s worst economic disaster zone to a model of what the International Monetary Fund hails as the healing properties of deep budget cuts. Latvia’s economy, after shriveling by more than 20 percent from its peak, grew by about 5 percent last year, making it the best performer in the 27-nation European Union. Its budget deficit is down sharply and exports are soaring.

Now its abrupt turn for the better has put a spotlight on a ticklish question for those who look to orthodox economics for a solution to Europe’s wider economic woes: Instead of obeying any universal laws of economic gravity, do different people respond differently to the same forces?

in Latvia, where the government laid off a third of its civil servants, slashed wages for the rest and sharply reduced support for hospitals, people mostly accepted the bitter medicine. Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis, who presided over the austerity, was re-elected, not thrown out of office, as many of his counterparts elsewhere have been. The cuts calmed fears on financial markets that the country was about to go bankrupt, and this meant that the government and private companies could again get the loans they needed to stay afloat. At the same time, private businesses followed the government in slashing wages, which made the country’s labor force more competitive by reducing the prices of its goods. As exports grew, companies began to rehire workers.

Now, Mr. Lapid’s stunning success

is being viewed by many voters, activists and analysts here as a victory for the secular mainstream in the intensifying identity battle gripping the country.

the widespread draft exemptions for the ultra-Orthodox, integrating them into the work force, and shifting the balance of who pays taxes and who receives government aid.

Stropped train triggers major political row in Balkans

A Serbian train halted at the border with Kosovo and bearing signs reading "Kosovo is Serbian," has fueled a major crisis in the Balkans and escalated a potential Russia-West row over dominance in the heart of the Balkans.

Serbia accused Kosovo's leaders on Sunday of "wanting war" and warned that it would defend "every inch" of its territory, a day after the train, decorated in Serbian Christian Orthodox symbols and flags, was prevented from entering the neighboring nation.

THE last several months have brought a dramatic escalation in conflict across the Middle East, almost all of it involving tensions between Sunni and Shiite Muslims

The kingdom has sent planeloads of weapons and millions of dollars to Sunni militants in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, many of them Salafi extremists. In contrast to Tehran, Riyadh has no compunction ab

And yet, as new and disturbing as these developments may appear, the linkage of sectarian and secular interests is a return to the classic geopolitics of religion in the Middle East