NEW YORK – The last time the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance organized a conference at Columbia University, in 2007, Israeli activist Tova Hartman electrified a crowd of several hundred with her call to “stop kvetching” and start acting until the plight of “chained women,” or agunot, was resolved.

“Let this be the last JOFA conference where we need to ask if there’s a halachic heter [permissive legal ruling] for agunot,” Hartman said of women seeking divorces from husbands refusing them a religious writ of divorce, or get.

The audience roared its approval.

Three years later, Hartman has her wish. Agunot activists are no longer asking if methods consistent with Jewish law exist to help such women; they know that they do.

Jeanette Friedman and Philip Sieradski were honored by the Teaneck school board and the Department of New Jersey War Veterans last Wednesday at a board of education meeting at Teaneck High School. The New Milford couple were thanked for donating more than 250 books and DVDs, as well as artwork by Otto David Sherman, to the Teaneck High School Holocaust and Genocide Studies Center. The president of the School Board, Henry Pruitt, presented each of them with a Teaneck Apple pin.

The Friedman-Sieradski Holocaust and Genocide Studies Library, created in honor of their parents, Peska and Wolvie Friedman and Daniel and Regina Sieradski, all Holocaust survivors, came from their personal collection.

WASHINGTON – Last summer, when the relationship between the Obama and Netanyahu administrations was getting off to what appeared to be a rocky start, Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren was at pains — twice — to deny that he had been “summoned” to the State Department for a dressing down.

One such “meeting” was actually a friendly phone call, he said, and the other was a routine getting-to-know-you meeting. The distinction was key, he told journalists: When the State Department actually “summons” an envoy, “that’s serious.”

Welcome to the serious zone: Oren’s spokesman, Jonathan Peled, confirmed to JTA that the ambassador indeed had been “summoned” for a meeting last Friday with James Steinberg, the deputy secretary of state. The summons came as the controversy engendered by Israel’s announcement of new construction in eastern Jerusalem during last week’s visit by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden showed no sign of abating.

In response to the Obama administration’s stepped-up criticism of Israeli building plans in Jerusalem, Jewish groups are slamming the White House for failing to speak out more against Palestinian incitement.

Particularly galling, several Jewish organizational leaders said, is that the administration has ratcheted up its criticism of Israel while failing to utter a word about the decision of the Palestinian Authority to go through with plans to name a public square in Ramallah after Dalal Mughrabi, a terrorist who led a 1978 bus hijacking in which 37 Israelis, including 12 children, were killed.

On Passover, we’re all looking for those new and different appetizers and entrees that aren’t the same old same old recycled boring ones. This year, shake up your Pesach menus with the following extra-special and fun recipes from the Orthodox Union.

JERUSALEM – For Sindy Benavides, a Hispanic community organizer from Virginia who was visiting Israel last week, the Jewish community is a newfound friend.

Three years ago, Benavides said, she had the “frightening” experience of seeing the number of anti-immigration bills introduced in the Virginia House of Representatives triple to 148 — a reaction, she said, to the influx of Latino immigrants in the area.

With funding and training from the American Jewish Committee, Benavides and her fellow Latino community members mobilized to defeat about 100 of the bills in the 2006-07 legislative session — all those whose passage ran counter to the interests of their community.

A few years ago I accepted an invitation to share a Passover seder at the home of my then-boyfriend’s parents.

Since we were becoming more serious as a couple, I was excited to experience this penultimate sign of family acceptance. I bought a cute new dress to wear and some gourmet kosher-for-Passover chocolates for his mom. I prepped by asking for short bios on second cousins I’d be meeting for the first time and, in case I was asked, I practiced the Four Questions.

Shortly after the seder began, it became apparent that this night indeed was going to be much different from all other nights.