The day that the American Jewish community experienced the most deadly anti-Semitic hate crime directed at it in the history of the United States was also Shabbat, the weekly Jewish day of rest. So when Shabbat ended at sundown in the densely Jewish town of Squirrel Hill, where a gunman killed 11 Jews at prayer,…
(JTA) — The Saturday evening event at a Jewish day school in western Massachusetts will in many ways look like a typical havdalah. There will be a musical ceremony marking the end of Shabbat with a braided candle, grape juice and spice bags. But the event at the Lander Grinspoon Academy in Northampton will also…
NEW YORK (JTA) — Marijuana entrepreneur Catherine Goldberg was working on an event with the Orthodox founders of Mitzva Herbal, a company that makes kosher-certified cannabis-infused edibles, when she shared her dream of uniting marijuana-loving Jews over Friday-night dinners. “They were, like, ‘Cat, we can’t smoke on Shabbat,” Goldberg, 28, recalled. “So I figured havdalah,…
I remember, when I was 6 or 7 years old, a ritual: Immediately after Havdalah my mother would run over to the phone — a yellow rotary phone embedded in the kitchen wall, to call her parents. It was 1970 or thereabouts. We lived in Montreal then, and it was a long-distance call to New…
Courtesy Minneapolis Institute of Arts Part of the Havdalah ritual, which bids adieu to the departing Sabbath, recognizes the divine separator between sacred and profane, light and darkness, Israel and the nations, and the seventh day and weekdays. The second to last distinction is deemphasized in a unique Jewish circa-1800 spice box currently on view…
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