A redeemed Torah scroll is one which has been repaired, either after having been saved from one of the European communities decimated in the Holocaust, or given by a synagogue in which it is no longer used. Judy Shapiro describes how a redeemed Torah scroll found a home at an IDF base.

The Shalom Hartman Institute proved to be intellectually nourishing, eliciting much appreciation from a skeptical American secular Jew. With a superb program devoted to scholarly discussion it addresses major challenges facing the Jewish people while accepting various points of view

And invitation to join an avid and enthusiastic diverse group of people meeting every Wednesday in the Tel Aviv area to learn, discuss, and explore Bible and Talmud under the expert guidance of Rabbi Avraham Fischer.

Twelfth generation British man receives a Chanukiah in 1967 as the only person family members believed would actually use the keepsake. Read the family history of this memento and how it passed to his possession.

Historical facts about Chanukah are known but sources disagree how “Chanukah” got its name and whether the ‘work’ or ‘resting’ to which it may refer means desisting from constructive activity, women’s work, or resting from battle. What do you think?

A touching excerpt from the “Marrakech Mellah Tales”, which is a collection of short stories, told from a young Moroccan girl’s point of view.

Annette Keen recalls an incident when she was 8 years old, on Yom Kippur 1952. Her father was a survivor from a displaced persons camp in Germany and she and her family were living in a rural community in the USA. Her father was the Cantor and he was unusually quiet and thoughtful as they set out for the Kol Nidre service. Finally he told her that he had been thinking about the past and was praying for forgiveness for leaving his father behind.

The practice within the Jewish tradition of assigning mystical meanings to words or phrases based on their numerical value is explained by Judy Shapiro in ESRA and Gematria. Citing the Talmud and Midrash, she states that by reading words and sentences as numbers, they can be compared to other words and phrases of the same value.