I always knew I was lucky to be a girl. This, despite being told that I was not. In the ultra-Orthodox world where I grew up, the boys are the exalted ones. Superiority belongs to the men, who learn the holy Torah. Still. I always knew I was lucky to be a girl. We were…
Members of a Kansas City synagogue have come to the aid of Jewish Hurricane Sandy victims in Long Island by donating a Torah scroll to a synagogue that lost four. Kehilath Israel Synagogue, an Orthodox synagogue in Overland Park, Kan., which has more than 15 Torah scrolls, is donating a Torah scroll to Congregation Ahavas…
Eilenberg trimmed his beard on Tuesday and did not leave home until Friday. It was his wife, my good friend Gitty, who put an end to it — she who could not understand him. “You wanted to trim your beard for over a year,” she screamed, exasperated. “Why are you crying now like you lost…
When Rabbi Avremel Okonov arrived Tuesday morning at the school he co-founded 10 years ago in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, the water in the basement had already receded from the high water mark. It only came up to his knees. Everywhere he looked around his school, Mazel Academy, there was destruction. On the…
Krakow’s Progressive Jewish community has received its first Torah scroll, which was donated by a sister community in Milano. The Torah scroll arrived in Poland and at the Beit Krakow community on Oct. 5 along with several members of Milano’s Beth Shalom Jewish Reform Congregation, according to Magda Koralewska of Beit Krakow. Rabbi Leigh Lerner…
No Jewish tradition is more revered, more popularly identified with Judaism than learning. And yet, strangely, the commandment to study Torah appears nowhere in the Torah. It actually originates in the Talmud. The sages inferred it from the biblical commandment to “teach it (the Torah) diligently to thy children” (Deuteronomy 6:7). They figured you can’t…
The Kittel Collection is a series of clothing pieces that explores the different ways clothing is used as a vehicle for meaning and identity within our tradition and literature. The kittel is a simple, white, garment used as a burial shroud, and customarily worn by men on various Jewish holy days. Each month, The Sisterhood…
It is a sad week for women’s Torah study, with the news that the Advanced Talmudic Institute at Matan — founded 24 years ago by Rabbanit Malke Bina — is closing its doors. Matan did not confirm its reason for closing, but I suspect that the approaching sunset of one of its main funders, the Avi Chai…
100% of profits support our journalism
