If this happened to my kids, I would be so furious, I wouldn’t be able to speak to anyone rationally until the parents of every student involved made a public apology.
Students assaulted during ‘Kick A Jew Day’
Ten students are serving suspensions for their roles in what was called “Kick a Jew Day” at North Naples Middle. We talked to one student Monday who said this was happening all over school.
See the video at the link with the parent(?) who doesn’t think it’s a big deal.
Hundreds of gold coins from the seventh century have been uncovered just outside the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced Monday.
The hoard of 264 gold coins was discovered Sunday by a British tourist volunteering at the ongoing dig in a parking lot outside the Dung Gate in the ancient City of David.
How cool is this?
A rare half-shekel coin, first minted in 66 or 67 C.E., was discovered by 14-year-old Omri Ya’ari as he sifted through dirt removed from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, along with other volunteers. This is the first such coin to be found at the Temple Mount.
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The half-shekel coin was first minted during the Great Revolt against the Romans. The face of the coin has a branch with three pomegranates and ancient Hebrew letters reading “holy Jerusalem.” The back reads “half shekel.”
The coin that was found in the sifting project, though well-preserved, showed some fire damage. Experts believe it was damaged the same fire that destroyed the Second Temple in 70 C.E.
“The half-shekel coin was used to pay temple taxes,” said Dr. Gabriel Barkay. “The coins were apparently minted at the Temple Mount itself by the Temple authorities.”
The half-shekel tax is mentioned in the book of Exodus, commanding every Jew to contribute half a shekel to the Temple every year so it can purchase public sacrifices.
Imagine This – A musical that takes place in the Warsaw Ghetto. Really. It’s called Imagine This. Pretty good reviews too.
“Imagine This” tells the story of a family of Jewish actors incarcerated in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942. To give themselves courage, they stage a play about the siege of Masada in AD72-73.
In an article about a murder that took place in a church, the Ny Times describes an interesting Christian church:
St. Thomas Knanaya, where some 60 families worship in a Christian tradition that traces its heritage to Abraham and its culture to Jews of the Aramaic-speaking regions of Israel and Syria, who migrated in 345 A.D. to the Malabar coast, in what is now the state of Kerala, in southwest India.
In recent decades, thousands of Knanaya people have migrated to North America. They preserve many customs modeled on Jewish traditions, including the menorah, unleavened bread at Passover and wedding canopies, and they practice endogamous marriage.
Well to be honest, I wasn’t sure what endogamous marriage was, but since I’m Jewish and married, I wanted to make sure I was getting in on the fun. Turns out, it just means “the practice of marrying within a social group”. Oh well.
This morning, my synagogue, Anshai Torah of Plano, will be having a groundbreaking ceremony on a multi-million dollar expansion project. It is fitting that we’re embarking on this endeavor on a day of remembrance such as this. Baruch Hashem our family was able to contribute what is for us a significant amount to this project, and for the first time in my adult life I will belong to a synagogue that I can truly call home, where our investment is not just emotional or familiar, but a permanent part of our community’s history.
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Seven decades on, an Israeli journalist has been sifting for remnants of the Night of Broken Glass in a rubbish dump an hour’s drive northeast of Berlin in the German state of Brandenburg.
Following a tip from locals, Yaron Svoray, 54, discovered a bottle imprinted with a Star of David and part of a backrest that might have been used in synagogues around that time.
Experts are expected to be called in to investigate the site in Schorfheide, where Hitler’s designated successor, Hermann Goering, maintained his country residence.
Mark Bittman of the NY Times shows us how to make traditional Kasha Varnishkes.
I just finished reading Foreskin’s Lament by Shalom Auslander. This was a very quick and entertaining read. I am looking forward to his next book.
The book is a memoir of Auslanders’ time growing up as the rebellious son of an Orthodox Jewish family in Monsey, Rockland County, New York. Having spent my junior high and high school years going to the same places as he did (Rickels, the Nanuet Mall, etc.) and being Jewish myself, the memoir had an added air of authenticiy for me.
Unfortunately, Auslander had an abusive father which helped to drive him away from Judaism completely and he revels in giving the finger to God whenver he can, always “knowing” that God can strike him or his family down at any time for his sins. “That would be so God”, the author frequently reminds us.
I thought the best part of the book was a sequence where he befriends a girl he meets in a “community service” program for juvenille criminals, then lies to his still-religious friends by creating an imaginary slutty girlfriend with the same name.
I would definitely suggest this book to any Jewish person with an open mind who can realize that Judaism, or any other religion, only works when followers who are your family and teachers are not hypocrites and/or jerks. I hope that Shalom and his family find the peace that every family deserves.
Ancestry.com has partnered with JewishGen.org and American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to create the world’s largest online repository of Jewish Family History collections. The combined databases comprise nearly 26 million records of Jews that can be searched by Ancestry’s world class technology. Some collections are reserved for subscribers, while millions of records remain freely accessible to the public. Jewish genealogy expert Gary Mokotoff will walk us through the North American, European, Holocaust and other significant Jewish collections on Ancestry.com. He will highlight some of the benefits this collection and search technology will provide to people searching for their Jewish heritage.
