Weekly must-reads: NY Chabad rabbi sews up bespoke suit market & 4 other stories
Israel may not have stitched together a government yet, but on the other side of the pond, a Hasidic New York rabbi is seamlessly balancing the sacred and the profane in his high-ticket bespoke suit boutique.
Features writer Renee Ghert-Zand spoke with Rabbi Yosel Tiefenbrun, a tailor who trained on London’s famed Savile Row and now has his own house in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
The eldest of 10 siblings in a London Chabad home, Tiefenbrun says his family has always supported his dream, although it did help steer him from women’s haute couture to men’s tailoring.
On the day The Times of Israel interviewed him by phone, writes Ghert-Zand, Tiefenbrun — who sports a long, well-groomed beard and round glasses — told her he was wearing purple trousers, mustard yellow socks, and a green jacket. Not for him the standard black-and-white uniform of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men, she quipped.
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If all goes according to plan, a Daniel Libeskind-designed Holocaust Namenmonument, or Names Monument, will open in Amsterdam during the summer of 2021. Features writer Matt Lebovic explains that it’s a memorial 70 years in the making.
After World War II, a Dutch artist named Jaap Kaas was asked by Jewish community leaders to design a monument. His vision was to memorialize by name each of the 100,000 Dutch Jews who did not come back.
The floundering Jewish community committee deemed his vision as “ungrateful” and instead built a Monument of Jewish Gratitude in 1950.
The new Libeskind monument takes Kaas as inspiration and will be built of 102,000 bricks — each with the name of a victim — that will form giant Hebrew letters spelling the word “Remember.”
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For the first time in its 105-year history, the Joint Distribution Committee has appointed a female CEO. Firebrand markets scholar Dr. Sigal Shelach took the helm a year ago as the head of JDC Israel.
In a lengthy conversation with Jewish World editor Amanda Borschel-Dan, Shelach gave an overview of the Israel operation’s past, present, and future. While commanding a third of the annual Global JDC budget, Shelach has big plans to leverage the de facto startup nation of welfare and social innovation she heads.
Speaking about the future of women in the Jewish and Israeli nonprofit world’s leadership, Shelach gave an insider’s perspective that while the system must change and allow for more flexible work environments, women entering the workforce must also take the simple step of dreaming of taking on leadership roles to make them a reality.
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A standard complete blood count test from just a drop of blood in minutes is no longer relegated to the realms of Star Trek. Startup Israel editor Shoshanna Solomon takes us behind the new technology in Israeli company Sight Diagnostics.
She reports that Sight Diagnostics has received US Food and Drug Administration clearance to market its blood test device. The nod will allow hospital labs, diagnostic providers and outpatient clinics to use its OLO blood analyzer, the company said in a statement.
To use Sight’s product, she writes, the physician or nurse pricks the patient’s finger and places a drop of blood into a disposable plastic cartridge that is inserted into the OLO, which looks like a small home printer. The machine, equipped with a camera, takes thousands of images of the millions of cells within the sample. Software developed by the firm based on machine learning algorithms analyzes the images and provides the results in a printout or via email.
To make the technology truly on par with Star Trek, though, we just need an Israeli startup to invent a 3D printer that will also help us avoid pharmacy lines as well.
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The most Jewish series on television is back. ToI film writer Jordan Hoffman caught up with three stars of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” a few days before the drop of Season 3 on December 6.
While Hoffman chatted with supporting players Marin Hinkle (Rose Weissman), Caroline Aaron (Shirley Maisel), and Kevin Pollak (Moishe Maisel), he partook of the very same deli nosh as last year — and unearthed a few spoilers.
Actor Hinkel said she was given no advance warning of an unusual plot development. “’Here’s the script, tomorrow we’ll be shooting that’ and I went ‘whoa whoa cowboy hat?!’” she related.
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