Hasidic Jews celebrating a Jewish holiday triggered a massive explosion in London’s Stamford Hill neighborhood after putting cell phones into a bonfire pyre, the Jewish Chronicle reported. The bonfire had been kindled for Lag B’Omer, a holiday that falls halfway between Passover and Shavuot. It is traditional in Israel and among religious Jews to create…
(JTA) — Municipalities throughout Israel are heeding officials’ calls to ban Lag b’Omer bonfires because of dangerous weather conditions days after 10 Israeli teens died in flash floods during a hike despite warnings of such danger. The hot and dry conditions, with winds, have blanketed the country for two days. Officials are concerned that the…
Today, like many, many other days on the Jewish calendar, is a Jewish holiday. It’s Lag B’omer, the 33rd day in the 49-day countdown between Passover and Shavuot, which serves as a break from the Omer, a traditional quasi-mourning period (more on that here). On Lag B’omer, observant Jews get married (and they do, in…
ousands of pilgrims traveled to Meron in northern Israel to mark the start of Lag B’Omer. Mount Meron is the burial place of grave of Jewish Kabbalist and mystic Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, a popular pilgrimage site for the holiday. The pilgrims began lighting bonfires after midnight on Saturday night, with hundreds of thousands of…
Remember Chrismukkah of 2016, when Christmas fell smack in the middle of Hanukkah? Or Thanksgivukkah, that semi-rare event when Hanukkah happened to fall on that most American of holidays, Thanksgiving? (The last time this happened was 2013.) Now there’s another unicorn of a day. I’m talking about the fact that the barbecue-and-bonfire focused Lag Ba’Omer…
And at home in these wasted paradises after the invasion and the raising of the flag and Cain after the ousting of one dictator and the installing of another the carcasses will be gnawed white – Kwame Dawes Thirty-three days after we left Egypt, the manna started dropping from heaven. It lay on the ground…
Tunisia has increased security for a traditional Lag b’Omer procession on the island of Djerba. Additional police and military officers were assigned to the area and roadblocks were installed at entrances to the island and near hotels for the events on Wednesday and Thursday. About 500 foreign visitors are expected for the celebration, down from…
Twenty four thousand students who studied with the famed 2nd Century Rabbi Akiva were killed by a terrible plague. What sin made them deserving of such a wipeout? “They did not treat each other with respect,” the Talmud says plainly. What does the holiday of Lag B’Omer, which arrives this evening, have to do with…
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