The word phylactery comes from the Greek phylaktḗrion meaning amulet, safeguard, or protections. Phylacteries, tefillin in Hebrew, are small, specifically made boxes to contain Hebrew texts. They are ...

A beautiful axiom of Jewish tradition is that one mitzvah will beget another. Nowhere is this wisdom more clearly displayed than in the workings of the incredibly innovative Kesher Tefillin Project ...

“You know Barbie’s getting a new job,” says my friend Mimi to me. “People can vote for her new career.” I put tefillin on a Mattel Barbie doll in 2006, unwittingly creating the Jewish icon now known ...

Nearly 100 inmates join Megillah reading, tefillin and Seudas Purim at Rikers Island. On Purim day at Rikers Island, as ...

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Several Modern Orthodox High Schools in the New York area have recently allowed female students to don tefillin during the morning prayer services at school. This decision has generated much ...

The so-called “Tefillin Bomber”, as Jews are enjoying calling him, is the news item du jour, given that panic arising from a 17-year-old Orthodox Jew’s so-called “strange” activities onboard a New ...

Rabbi Professor David Golinkin is president and professor of Jewish law at the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. For 20 years he served as chair of the Va’ad Halakhah (Law Committee) ...

Ramaz, a Modern Orthodox school in Manhattan, has joined SAR in agreeing to allow girls to pray with tefillin, although the school’s principal reportedly says no students are currently doing so. “If a ...

Education Minister Yoav Kisch has defended the actions of a school principal who was filmed telling a student to stop putting on tefillin, a Jewish ritual involving prayer, in a public space. Shai ...

David Miller* [*not his real name], a pious observant Jew was at Logan Airport getting ready to board United Flight 175. He was going to LA on an important business trip and had to make this flight. A ...

This story is free to read because readers choose to support LAist. If you find value in independent local reporting, make a donation to power our newsroom today. Flight attendants on an American ...