A Jewish Woman’s Prayer Book By Aliza Lavie Spiegel & Grau, 448 pages, $35. God speaks to Jewish women as well as to Jewish men. God loves Jewish women as well as God loves Jewish men. From biblical times to the present, there have been prayers that speak to this love, answer this call and…
I was pushing my son’s stroller along the main avenue of our Brooklyn neighborhood on a bright fall morning, when I was stopped by a bearded man in a top hat, his long black coat flapping. “Excuse me, are you Jewish?” he asked. I stared at him, stunned for two reasons: The simpler of the…
In 1993, as I was preparing to produce a recorded anthology representing 25 years of my synagogue music, I found myself searching for a particular kind of voice — one that was harder to find than you might expect. I was looking for a cantor who could bring an authentic American/Ashkenazic vocal sensibility to the…
Forward reader Gertrude Frankel writes: “I have been trying, since seeing the movie ‘Little Jerusalem’ (in which such a figure is a great help to a married woman whose husband has strayed), to find out what the name is for the female attendant in the mikvah. I have asked a rabbi, a Hebrew teacher, and…
Saratoga Springs, N.Y. – This idyllic town near the Adirondack Mountains is better known for horse racing than for holiness; visitors flock here to bathe in mineral springs rather than in mikvehs. But for Rabbi Linda Motzkin, Saratoga Springs has proved to be ideal for something more unexpected: the sacred work of writing a Torah….
‘So, are they going to do a mezinke at your brother’s wedding?” a Jewish friend asked this past spring, one eyebrow raised quizzically, as we watched our children play on a jungle gym. I shrugged my shoulders and changed the subject. To her, it was a question of tradition. To me, it was a full-fledged…
It was just before Rosh Hashanah when poet Dinah Berland, estranged from her son for 11 years, stumbled upon a book of women’s prayers that she believes led to her reconciliation with him. As Berland tells it, in 1998 she had wandered into a Los Angeles store that sells used books, when a slim book…
Daniele Sullivan has made a career out of creating wigs, but even she confesses that up close she can’t tell a lace front creation from a real head of hair. So that’s what she teaches her classes. Sullivan, an Orthodox Parisian who moved to Israel two years ago with her husband and their 10 children…
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