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on the cover

in
the

SCAN PAGE
TO SEE MORE
PHOTOS FROM
SCHWARTZ’S TRIP!

From

Russia,

Jonathan Schwartz’s surprise trip fortified his appreciation of Jewish law and informed his worldview.
world

JONATHAN SCHWARTZ SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS

I

n early 2018, I received an invitation from Professor
Howard Lupovitch, director of the Cohn-Haddow
Center for Judaic Studies at Wayne State University,
and U.S. District Court Judge Avern Cohn to attend
the Jewish Law Association’s (JLA) 20th International
Conference in Moscow, Russia.
The JLA is an international organization of lawyers,
legal scholars and judges (including Cohn) that works
to promote the study and research of Jewish law. A few
years prior, Judge Cohn expressed an interest in connect-
ing the Jewish Bar Association of Michigan (JBAM), an
organization I co-founded in 2014 and currently serve
as president, with the JLA to help form bonds between
Michigan’s Jewish legal community and others across the
world.

As grateful as I was for the opportunity, I had reserva-
tions about traveling to Moscow given the current politi-
cal climate and the state of U.S./Russia relations. Like
many Americans on both sides of the aisle, I’ve been out-
raged by reports of Russian government meddling in the
2016 election among other activities on the world stage.
Despite my concerns, I was excited to participate, meet
Jewish legal practitioners and academics from around
the world, and visit a country spotlighted in the news
every day.

MISHPAT IVRI

As it turned out, the conference location was deliberate
and important. One hundred years ago, during a Russian
renaissance, a group of Russian Jews, running the spec-

trum of religious to secular, formed the Mishpat Ivri
Society. Mishpat Ivri is a field of legal scholarship exam-
ining the similarities, differences and interplay between
traditional Jewish law (Halachah) — primarily based
upon the Torah, laws and opinions issued by rabbis (often
functioning as judges) and long-standing Jewish customs
— and secular modern laws.
The study of Mishpat Ivri also aids in the effort to
utilize Jewish law to inform and shape current legal deci-
sions and lawmaking, although whether and to what
extent that should be done has been a topic of contention
since the Mishpat Ivri Society’s founding.
Mishpat Ivri scholarship covers various legal subjects,
from family to criminal law, business law, contracts
and real estate, to personal injury and international law,

continued on page 14

ABOVE LEFT TO RIGHT: Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square; The Cathedral of Christ the Savior, a Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Moscow (the original church was destroyed on the order of Joseph Stalin in 1931, then
the property served as the world’s largest open-air swimming pool before the new church was rebuilt in the 1990s; Mural titled Ballerina by Brazilian street artist Eduardo Kobra not far from the Bolshoy Theatre.

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September 27 • 2018

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