About Mishpacha

Mishpacha

Mishpacha, whose name means family in Hebrew, is a weekly Orthodox Jewish magazine package produced by the Mishpacha Publishing Group in Jerusalem, Israel, in both English and Hebrew. Subtitled Jewish Family Weekly, it is a Haredi weekly serving Orthodox readers in Israel and worldwide. It publishes news, features, analysis and family supplements, and it is the only one of the major English-language publications serving the Haredi Jewish community in the United States to be based in Jerusalem. Its English and Hebrew editions differ in content and style: the Hebrew edition is part newspaper in character, while the English version is a magazine.

Founding of the Mishpacha Publishing Group

The Mishpacha Publishing Group was founded in 1984 with the publication of the Hebrew Mishpacha magazine. Publisher and chief executive Eliyahu Paley, also given as Eli Paley, teamed with Moshe Grylak towards the goal of producing a magazine that would serve as a conduit for the exchange of ideas and values between the varying streams within Jewish Orthodoxy, among them the Hasidic, Yeshivish, Sephardic and Modern Orthodox communities. With no other weekly or monthly magazines geared towards an Orthodox Jewish readership at that time, Mishpacha quickly gained popularity, in effect launching the Jewish Orthodox magazine industry. The first editor for the Hebrew edition was Asher Zuckerman. Established as a monthly magazine, it became a weekly magazine at the beginning of 1991. After a while the publication split into two competing weekly papers, one retaining the original name Mishpacha and the other called Hashavua, meaning This Week.

The English edition launched in 2004

The English Mishpacha launched in 2004 with a weekly package including the flagship Mishpacha Magazine and Mishpacha Junior. Mishpacha was the first full-colour weekly magazine targeting the Anglo-Orthodox population worldwide, with the standalone children's magazine also serving as an innovation. Family First, introduced to the package in 2005, was also the first of its kind, a full-colour weekly magazine by and for Jewish women. The English launch transformed a Jerusalem Hebrew title into an international one. By 2024 the English magazine had reached its 1,000th issue, dated 21 February 2024, a milestone that underlined how completely the weekly package had become part of Orthodox family life in English-speaking communities as well as in Israel.

The weekly package and its supplements

Mishpacha is sold and read as a package rather than as a single magazine. The weekly English magazine package includes the titular flagship publication Mishpacha as well as the women's magazine Family First, the food section Family Table, and the youth magazine Mishpacha Junior and TeenPages. Expanded holiday editions include Calligraphy, a journal of curated fiction, the scholarly journal Kolmus, and various additions covering special interest themes. The weekly Hebrew magazine package includes the flagship Hebrew Mishpacha magazine and newspaper, as well as the women's magazine Betoch HaMishpacha and the children's magazine Yeladim. The package expands on a monthly basis with the addition of the Hebrew Kolmus and the culinary magazine Te'imot, as well as occasional topic-specific special additions. This bundled structure means a single purchase brings news, opinion, women's features, food writing, children's reading and fiction into one household each week.

Audience across the Orthodox world

Mishpacha is one of the four major English-language newspapers and magazines serving the Haredi Jewish community in the United States. Together, the four publications had a circulation of about 100,000 as of 2015, and Mishpacha reported a circulation of almost 45,000 copies as of July 2006. Mishpacha is the only one of those publications based in Jerusalem. Its readership spans the various streams of Orthodoxy worldwide, and its stated founding purpose was precisely to provide a shared platform across those streams rather than a organ for a single community or movement. It reflects the various views of parts of the Haredi public in Israel and the rest of the world, publishing timely analysis of world events alongside features intended to entertain and inform, all from an Orthodox perspective.

Ownership, guidance and editorial character

Mishpacha is owned by Eliyahu Paley, a Jerusalem resident, together with the backing of a group of investors. As a Jewish newspaper that claims to speak for the Orthodox sector and is not owned or controlled by a certain political movement or sector, it follows the guidance of rabbinical advisors who take responsibility for its content. Moshe Grylak has served as editor in chief, with Shoshana Friedman listed as managing editor. Paley studied full-time in the Chevron Yeshivah and kollel until the age of 26, when he initiated the Hebrew Mishpacha, and from 1990 he steadily developed the idea from a small magazine into an international publication with a global readership. He lives with his family in Jerusalem. That combination of Torah background and publishing entrepreneurship shaped a magazine that treats religious guidance as part of its editorial structure, not as an external constraint.

Content: news, features and family life

The content of Mishpacha mixes hard news analysis with human interest, opinion and family reading. Its pages carry reporting and commentary on events in Israel and the wider world as they affect Orthodox communities, profiles of communal figures, historical and Torah-related features, serialized fiction, columns on family life and parenting, and extensive readers' correspondence. Family First addresses Jewish women directly, with features, fiction and advice written by and for women. Family Table covers food and cooking. Mishpacha Junior and TeenPages give younger readers their own material within the same weekly delivery. Kolmus adds a scholarly dimension, publishing longer Torah and thought pieces. The breadth is deliberate: the package is designed so that every member of an Orthodox household finds a section addressed to them.

Competition and the wider Orthodox magazine market

Mishpacha helped create the market in which it now competes. In November 2010, Rabbi Yitzchok Frankfurter, previously Torah editor for Mishpacha, and Rechy Frankfurter, previously Mishpacha's American desk editor, founded Ami Magazine, which became one of its principal competitors. The emergence of rival titles staffed by former Mishpacha editors illustrates the magazine's role as a training ground and agenda-setter for Orthodox publishing. Hamodia and Yated Ne'eman, the other major English-language Haredi publications alongside Mishpacha and Ami, are newspapers rather than magazine packages, which leaves Mishpacha's full-colour weekly bundle distinctive in format as well as in its Jerusalem base. Its online edition, at mishpacha.com, publishes magazine, Family First and column material for readers who follow it digitally as well as in print.

Place in Jewish media

Mishpacha's place in Jewish media rests on three facts that recur in every account of it: it began in Jerusalem in 1984 when no comparable Orthodox magazine existed, it expanded in 2004 into the first full-colour English weekly for the Anglo-Orthodox world, and it built a package model that other publishers later imitated. Based in Jerusalem, published in Hebrew and English, guided by rabbinical advisors and read across Hasidic, Yeshivish, Sephardic and Modern Orthodox communities, it functions as a shared weekly forum for a readership that is otherwise divided by geography, language and custom. Few magazines anywhere can claim to have launched an entire sector of publishing; accounts of the Orthodox magazine industry routinely credit Mishpacha with doing exactly that.

Continuing weekly publication

Mishpacha continues to publish weekly from Jerusalem in both languages, with the English package anchored by the flagship magazine, Family First, Family Table and its youth titles, and the Hebrew package anchored by the Hebrew Mishpacha together with Betoch HaMishpacha and Yeladim. Holiday seasons bring expanded editions, and monthly and occasional supplements add scholarly, culinary and themed material. The magazine marked its 1,000th English issue in February 2024, four decades after the Hebrew monthly from which it grew first appeared. For its readers, the arrival of the package each week is a fixed point in family life, which is precisely what its name, family, promises. The title is catalogued internationally under OCLC number 57819059, a small bibliographic marker of how far a Jerusalem Hebrew monthly travelled: from a local Orthodox readership in the 1980s, through a weekly Hebrew newspaper-magazine and a split with a rival title, to a bilingual, full-colour international weekly whose women's, children's, food and scholarly supplements are read in Orthodox homes on several continents.