NEW YORK — Yosel Tiefenbrun looked in the mirror and he liked what he saw.
The 23-year-old Chabad rabbi and apprentice at Maurice Sedwell, a bespoke tailor’s shop on London’s Savile Row, was wearing a vintage double-breasted jacket with gold buttons, tasseled Barker shoes, a claret bow tie and matching handmade hat and square handkerchief.
Then he ran out the door to attend the “Oscars of tailoring” — the Golden Shears Award ceremony honoring the best in British fashion.
Several of his colleagues were in the running for a prize. They came back empty, but Tiefenbrun did not.
Nick Carvell, the online fashion editor at British GQ, snapped his picture and posted it the following day on the magazine’s website, naming Tiefenbrun “best in show.” Within days, the photograph of the chasidic rabbi and his natty attire was picked up by Jewish publications around the world.
MEMPHIS — The thick scent of a peppery rub wafted through the Margolin Hebrew Academy and Corky the Pig embroidered his chef’s hat with a K and became a cow.
Just before Purim, the famed Memphis barbecue joint Corky’s, with a hog for its mascot, koshered one of its smokers for a brisket fundraiser on behalf of the city’s Orthodox Jewish day school.
Organizers explained that the unusual marriage of brachot and BBQ was a product of a parlous economy, a small school in need of refurbishin...
WARSAW — Krzysztof Sliwinski, a longtime Catholic activist in Jewish-Polish relations, gazed wide-eyed at the swooping interior of this city’s Museum of the History of Polish Jews.
Nearly two decades in the making, the more than $100 million institution officially opens to the public this week amid a month of high-profile, state-sponsored events marking the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
“It’s incredible, incredible, incredible how things have changed,” Sliwinski tol...
PASSOVER EDITIONSECTION C PAGE 13
BOSTON — Years ago, Nancy Steiner set out to make her family seder a bit more entertaining for her own young kids. She wrote a poem that became very popular among family and friends.
On This Night: The Steps of the Seder in Rhyme, Steiner’s first published children’s book, is an updated version of that poem with large format, brightly colored illustrations by Wendy Edelson that will appeal to religiously observant families.
Along with Lotsa Matzah, it...
PASSOVER EDITION SECTION C PAGE 3
NEW YORK — On any given day, a wind might blow through the farmlands of South America, pick up an errant grain of barley and deposit it nearby among the vast rows of cultivated quinoa. If that barley manages to make its way into a sifted batch of quinoa, and avoid detection during repackaging, it could wind up gracing your seder table on Passover night.
However dubious it might seem, the scenario is among the reasons that the world’s largest kosher certi...