Morris Silverman News Today

“If you want to know about my brother, Jack Ruby, you should talk to Hillel Silverman. He was our rabbi in Dallas for ten years before President Kennedy’s assassination, and he knew Jack very well.”  It was 1976, and I had convinced Eva Rubenstein Grant — a loud woman with an even louder red wig — to appear on an ABC program to speak about her brother, who fatally shot John F. Kennedy’s alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald on live television thirteen years earlier. 

(JTA) — “If you want to know about my brother, Jack Ruby, you should talk to Hillel Silverman. He was our rabbi in Dallas for ten years before President Kennedy’s

Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner with links to the Mafia, was one of Silverman's congregants.

Silverman was spiritual leader of Shearith Israel from 1954 to 1964; Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner with links to the Mafia who shot Lee Harvey Oswald, was one of his congregants

A journalist recalls the career and brush with notoriety of Silverman, the founding rabbi of a Dallas congregation.

Every Passover, a new layer of memory becomes melded into this powerful mélange, transporting me between times and places and people

Despite a bounty of competitors, The Birnbaum machzor, first published in 1951 remained a staple of Orthodox synagogues largely because the 'worshipper is not called upon to search from page to page and to commute from reference to reference'

Rosh Hashanah greetings became a tool commonly used by advertisers in the postwar years, when the U.S. Jewish community was rapidly changing.

When a local Orthodox synagogue asked me to lead Yom Kippur prayers six years ago, one aspect of the request stood out: Was I comfortable using the “High Holyday Prayer Book” translated and edited by Philip Birnbaum? The archaic spelling of “Holyday” is a tipoff to the book’s longevity. First published in 1951 by the… Read More »

From the blog of Leora Kling Perkins at The Times of Israel