Jewish Blogs

Slice Of Life: Fresh Almonds By The Bag Full!

While some of you are picking cherries and strawberries, one of our local summer harvests happens to be almonds! And when my husband sees farmers selling these green mesh bag-fulls by the side of the road, he just goes crazy! Why? Eating these freshly picked untouched nuts is something he remembers from his childhood, and another one of his family’s ...

Slice Of Life: A Fruit Label Collection From The Heart…….

As a child we used to collect the little stickers that one finds on many kinds of fruit and save them on the back of one of the kitchen cabinet doors. I do believe the point of this was to appreciate where things come from, as well as being a geography lesson of sorts. Though come to think of it, ...

Slice Of Life: A Designer Bee Hive (for Rosh HaShana?)

Look what I spotted on the back of my brother’s property in Sonoma, CA. No, it is not a chest of drawers, silly you! It’s a modern day beehive! Yes, this is what they look like, more or less, just until now I’d only seen them in white.I just thought it was so wonderful that the hive was painted in ...

Skverer Rebbe’s estate auctioned off on eBay

With the success of last week’s eBay auction of the Skverer Rebbe’s matzo, many in the community have expressed hope that other items owned and used by the Skverer Rebbe can get a pretty penny at auction to help raise money to feed all those New Square community members who have been forced into unemployment by the rising rates of ...

Sitting Shiva for Traditional Shiva

I’ve been thinking about death and mourning quite a bit lately. To begin with, the first week of the new year brought with it a rash of deaths here in the Detroit Jewish community. There were a fair share of elderly grandparents who died in their 80s and 90s during the first week of 2012, but that isn’t all that ...

Sinai and Jewish Unity

Of all the many sterling qualities of the chareidi community in Israel, I suspect no one would list public relations acumen near the top. And of the many public relations failures of the community none looms larger than the widespread perception that chareidim are indifferent to the fate of their fellow Jews and feel no connection to them.That perception is ...

Simple Nature Craft For Kids: Making Pictures With Leaves

Here’s a fun nature craft with leaves, and hopefully a creative one that will help your little ones think “out of the box” just a bit? And even my kids (who have become very selective crafters…boo hoo, guess they’re a little burned out?) enjoyed doing this one! And just in time for Tu B’Shevat, which is tomorrow night!You’ll Need:thick leaves, ...

Simchat Torah & Women

Your discussion of women and Simchat Torah did not help my relationship with the chag. I have no particular desire to dance like the men but I find just standing around and watching it to be deeply boring. My feeling is that observing the dancing does nothing to develop my connection to Torah. What I’ve done for the last few ...

Simchat Torah Mysticism in the Age of YouTube

Google Images and YouTube videos are helping Jewish educators create new midrash and bring sacred meaning to age-old traditions. Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz created an innovative, interactive experience for the seven hakafot (circles) of Simchat Torah.Her “Seven Dances for Simchat Torah in the YouTube Era” is available on the Sh’ma Koleinu website. Sh’ma Koleinu is an online center for spirituality and connection from ...

Simcha Overload

Weddings! Bar mitvahs! Chopped liver!‘Tis a season of most joy in Yentaland these days as we recover from yesterday’s Shalom Y’all Jewish Food Festival and prepare for my Brother the Doctor’s wedding this week, along with the continued and possibly never-ending planning of Yenta Boy’s impending ritual of manhood.Yes, simchas are all about GOOD TIMES. But as most grown-ups know, fun TAKES ...

Silly Season Is Here Again

It’s silly season again in the Jewish world. In other words, yet another fight has broken out over conversions in Israel, and ostensibly smart people have taken to saying some truly risible things. In one corner, we find David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Congress, reviving an old chestnut, one I’d thought had been laid to well-deserved rest ...

Silence, Blessed Silence

One of the upshots of all the reading and thinking I did for Marcel Marceau: Master of Mime, was that I ended up doing a lot of thinking about something I’d never thought that much about before – silence and its power.It never used to be like this. I wasn’t always on a quest for quiet. An only child, I ...