Aaron Feuerstein, who owned a textile mill in Massachusetts and famously continued to pay his workers even after a devastating fire, has died. He was 95. Feuerstein, the former owner of Malden Mills in Lawrence, died Thursday night of complications from a fall days before at his home in Brookline, his son Daniel Feuerstein told The Boston Globe for a story Friday. “My father lived a full life,” Feuerstein told the newspaper. “I have been overwhelmed by the outpouring of condolences from the entire Malden Mills community. The love went both ways.” Malden Mills had been a major textile factory known for its Polartec synthetic fleece fabric.

A tragic Holocaust story came to came to an end on Wednesday afternoon when a Jewish child Holocaust survivor who converted to Christianity was brought to kever Yisrael next to his martyred relatives in Poland who are buried in a mass kever. Yaakov Tzvi (Hirsch) Griner, z’l, also known during his lifetime as Gregor (Grzegorz) Pawlowski, the Jewish bishop of Yafo, passed away last week and was buried on Wednesday in the Polish town of Izbica, where his mother, sisters and other Jews were cruelly murdered during the Holocaust. Many priests from the church in Yafo and local Polish priests came to the levaya and the beginning of the levaya was heavily dominated by their presence.

The US Senate on Wednesday confirmed Thomas Nides by voice vote to be the next ambassador to Israel. Nides, a secular Jew from Duluth, Minnesota, and former deputy secretary of state for management and resources under Hillary Clinton, expressed his support for US funding of Israel’s Iron Dome defensive missile system during his Senate confirmation hearing. “This is a defensive mechanism. It is to stop rockets from raining in on Israel. We are supportive of the replenishment and it is in our national security interest,” Nides said at the hearing. Nides has also pledged to support and advance the progress made in the Trump-brokered Abraham Accords, and to oppose anti-Semitic and anti-Israel BDS movement.

Last month, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Kratz, the shamash of 770, and Rabbi Yehuda Pevzner, the director of Mitzvah Tank NYC, parked their tank at a busy street corner in Lower Manhattan for the day, Chabad.info reported. When an elderly priest approached them, they relaxed from their misson of kiruv for a moment and began joking around with him. “The truth is that when we asked him if he was Jewish, it was a joke. Why would we ask a priest, dressed in long flowing white robes, with a huge cross dangling across his chest, if he was Jewish?” said Rabbi Kratz. The priest’s answer was shocking. “Yes, I’m Jewish.” “What do you mean? Was your mother Jewish?” He answered: “My parents were both Jews.” The priest explained that his parents has entrusted him to the church during the Holocaust.

Rabbi Eliahu Birnbaum, a well-known Dati Leumi Rav in Israel, drank a L’Chayim to the state of Israel together with Lev Tahor members this past April. Rabbi Birnbaum is the founding director of Ohr Torah Stone’s Emissary Training Programs and he travels around the world mentoring rabbis and teachers in the outreach and education organizations Ohr Torah Stone (OTS) dispatches to Jewish communities around the globe. He also researches Jewish kehillos around the world. In a video of the unusual scene, Rabbi Birnbaum is heard speaking and lamenting the fact that he’s not in Eretz Yisrael for Yom Ha’atzamut and the mesiras hanefesh he took for him to be with Lev Tahor instead. He also mentions that “tonight is Yom Hazikaron for fallen IDF soldiers.

Dr. Aaron T. Beck, a groundbreaking psychotherapist regarded as the father of cognitive therapy, died Monday at his Philadelphia home. He had turned 100 in July. Beck’s work revolutionized the diagnosis and treatment of depression and other psychological disorders. He died peacefully in his sleep, according to the Beck Institute for Cognitive Behavior Therapy, which he co-founded with his daughter, Dr. Judith Beck. “My father was an amazing person who dedicated his life to helping others,” the daughter said in a statement, nothing that her father continued to work until his death.

For years, Zebulon Simentov was known as the “last Jew of Afghanistan,” the sole remnant of a centuries-old community holding court in Kabul’s only remaining synagogue. He left the country last month for Istanbul after the Taliban seized power. Now it appears he was not the last one. Simentov’s distant cousin, Tova Moradi, was born and raised in Kabul and lived there until last week, more than a month after Simentov departed in September. Fearing for their safety, Moradi, her children and nearly two dozen grandchildren fled the country in recent weeks in an escape orchestrated by an Israeli aid group, activists and prominent Jewish philanthropists.

The Greek Supreme Court outlawed shechita on Wednesday, a move predicted by Jewish leaders following the ruling of the European Union’s court last year upholding similar bans. Last December, the European Court of Justice ruled that member countries are permitted to ban shechita for the sake of animal welfare without infringing on the rights of religious groups. The Greek ruling was in response to a petition filed by the Panhellenic Animal Welfare and Environmental Federation. “We warned in December about the downstream consequences that the European Court of Justice ruling carried with it, and now we see the outcome,” said Rabbi Menachem Margolin, chairman of the European Jewish Association, which is based in Brussels. “Jewish freedom of religion is under direct attack.

A survivor of the terrible journey to Auschwitz remembered how the youngest wailed. There were 99 children squeezed among 751 adults gasping for air, crazed by thirst and hunger, aboard convoy No. 63 that departed Paris at 10 minutes past midday on Dec. 17, 1943. The 828 murdered at the death camp from that trainload alone included 3-year-old Francine Baur, her sister Myriam, 9, their brothers Antoine and Pierre, 6 and 10, and their parents Odette and André. All born in France, their French citizenship proved worthless under France’s wartime Vichy regime that teamed up with the country’s Nazi occupiers and their extermination of Jews.

Rav Menachem Ladayov, a Chabad Rav in the 17th Arrondissement of Paris, had a disturbing surprise on Sunday when he was delivered a Jewish magazine with an anti-Semitic message scrawled on its cover. Rabbi Ladayov told Kikar H’Shabat that he gets the Hebrew-language Kfar Chabad magazine delivered to his home every week, and it’s always wrapped in black plastic. For some reason, he received a back copy of the newspaper from Elul on Sunday wrapped in clear plastic, with the word RAUS (get out of here) in German written on it along with a drawing of a Magen Dovid. He thinks that since the anti-Semitic postal clerk was able to see the cover of the magazine, he ripped the plastic and scrawled the nasty message.