Each of the 12 tribes of Israel received a specific piece of the Promised Land.

Today, Jews returning to Israel may live wherever they wish. Most English-speaking immigrants gravitate to such central areas as Jerusalem, Ra’anana, Beit Shemesh, and Chashmona’im.

But escalating real-estate prices in these clusters are keeping people from making the move, said Soli Yisrael Foger of Englewood, who grew up in Israel, left in 1983, and is ready to return.

His solution to that problem: Create a new “American-style” neighborhood in the more affordable Lower Galilee as a communal aliyah project.

The Claims Conference has blamed a now-dead regional director for bungling an early warning in 2001 about a massive fraud scheme that wasn’t halted until 2009.

But a document obtained by JTA shows top conference officials were concerned enough by the allegations that they launched their own probe in 2001, which failed to detect there was a wider fraud. Those involved in the second investigation included the organization’s chief professional at the time, Gideon Taylor, and its counsel, Julius Berman.

The probe resulted in an eight-page report that raised questions about the handling of several fraudulent cases by Semen Domnitser, a Claims Conference employee who was found guilty of orchestrating the $57 million scheme on May 8.

TEL AVIV — Dov Lipman has staked his budding political career on his reputation as a moderate charedi Orthodox leader, someone uniquely positioned to broker compromise between Israel’s increasingly polarized secular and religious communities.

The problem is that Israel’s charedi leaders say he’s not actually charedi.

Once seen as a possible bridge between Israel’s growing charedi community and the secular majority, Lipman, a freshman member of Knesset from the centrist Yesh Atid party, has weathered a torrent of criticism aimed at discrediting his charedi bona fides since his election in January.

JERUSALEM — Charedi Orthodox youths mobbed the Western Wall plaza by the thousands to protest Women of the Wall as they held their monthly prayer service.

The youths, many of them students from charedi Orthodox yeshivas, filled the Western Wall Plaza by 6:40 a.m. on Friday, 20 minutes before Women of the Wall, a women’s prayer group that holds monthly services at the site, also called the Kotel, began praying. Because charedi Orthodox women had packed the women’s section of the plaza earlier in the morning, the Women of the Wall were forced to pray in the back section of the plaza, further away from the Kotel itself.

The first thing you notice about David Kleid’s new electric sedan is the quiet.

Driving up the hills toward Jerusalem from his home in Ma’aleh Adumim, Kleid’s shiny blue Renault Fluence emits barely a whisper.

But the lack of noise is not what motivated the former Fair Lawn resident to lease the Fluence through Better Place, the U.S.-Israeli electric car company that aims to set up Israel as a replicable model for the rest of the world — if enough David Kleids are willing to give it a test drive.

Kleid, a physician in the pediatric intensive care unit at Hadassah University Medical Center-Ein Karem in Jerusalem, does not consider himself an “early adopter” type. The all-electric Renault appealed to him mainly for its ability to free him from the gas pump.

DAKAR, Senegal — Struggling to be heard over a flock of bleating sheep, Israel’s ambassador to Senegal invites a crowd of impoverished Muslims to help themselves to about 100 sacrificial animals that the embassy corralled at a dusty community center here.

The October distribution, held as French troops battled Islamists in neighboring Mali and one month after Muslim radicals killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya, is held annually in honor of Tabaski, the local name of the Muslim Eid al-Adha feast. The distribution is broadcast on national television in a land that is 95 percent Muslim, providing Israel with a powerful platform to burnish its image among Senegalese.

WASHINGTON — A same-sex Israeli couple struggling against U.S. immigration laws is set to become the face of the fight to extend one of the foundations of immigration policy to gays and lesbians.

Adi Lavy and Tzila Levy have been caught in the bureaucratic red tape of the American immigration system since Lavy, who suffers from a kidney ailment, arrived in the United States in 2011 to seek treatment.

The couple, whose New York marriage is not recognized by the federal government, have been able to stay together during Lavy’s illness and her subsequent return to Israel to care for an ailing parent thanks only to a series of interventions by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.). But an estimated 36,000 binational LGBT couples are potentially at risk of separation should one partner be forced to leave the country.

Thirteen-year-old Jessica Baer of Fair Lawn was hooked the first time she saw the video.

“The kids were the same age as me,” she said, recalling the first time she saw the film about child slaves in Ghana. “I was trying to compare my life with theirs. I felt very fortunate.”

Jessica saw the video three years ago at Camp Nah-Jee Wah in Milford, Pennsylvania. Evan Robbins, a Metuchen social studies teacher and founder of Breaking the Chain through Education, made a presentation at the YM/YWHA camp “and I was hooked right away,” said Jessica, who is a student at Fair Lawn’s Thomas Jefferson Middle School.