Belarus town honors Eliezer Ben Yehuda, father of modern Hebrew

Dozens of people, including a number of Israelis, gather in Glubokoe to celebrate life of ancient language reviver

By JTA in Times of Israel

A ceremony honoring Eliezer Ben Yehuda, the father of modern Hebrew, was held in the presence of Israeli dignitaries in a Belarussian town connected to his past.

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The ceremony, which launched the second Jewish learning conference in Belarus of Limmud FSU, was held Thursday at the main square of Glubokoe, located 100 miles north of Minsk, where Ben Yehuda, who died in 1922 in pre-state Israel, learned Jewish studies and where his wife was born.

Israelis attending the gathering of a few dozen people near a statue honoring Ben Yehuda, which was erected in 2010, included Ambassador to Belarus Yosef Shagal and Gil Hovav, Ben Yehuda’s great-grandson, a celebrity chef and food critic in Israel.

“Beyond being a great man and a visionary, my great-grandfather was also a man who was very much preoccupied with being respected,” Hovav said in his speech, which was delivered in Hebrew. “He would get into fights with people who he thought should show him more respect, and he rarely won in his lifetime.”

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Three Things We Should Never Say Before Rosh Hashanah

by Rabbi Benjamin Blech for aish.com

Insights from President Obama on how to prepare for Rosh Hashanah.

President Obama recently got into trouble for three statements he made about his role as the leader of the free world.

Obviously his words are important. His decisions play a crucial role in determining our national destiny. They will eventually face the verdict of history. Our personal resolutions almost assuredly pale in comparison.

Yet in the view of Maimonides, the great Jewish philosopher held by tradition to be second only to Moses, there is reason to believe that the choices we make in our own lives may very well have cosmic significance comparable to those of the most powerful political leader.

As we approach the High Holy days, Maimonides asks us to imagine that the fate of the world is placed on a scale weighing its good versus its evil – and is found to be perfectly balanced. Every one of us must view our lives as bearing the potential to sway God’s divine decree to one side or another based on the quality of the deeds we add the total equation.

It is a remarkable insight that imposes upon each of us the notion of a kind of collective responsibility which grants inestimable meaning and value to the seemingly minor roles we play on the stage of the world’s history.

Let us explore the words of President Obama – not as a political jibe – but in order to gain some insight that will help us properly prepare for Rosh Hashanah.

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Amid Zara's 'concentration camp' shirt debacle, Swedish retailer's sold-out T-shirt is more homage than exploitation.

Hannah Dreyfus for The Jewish Week

What do H&M and Jewish Voice For Peace have in common? Mishnaic sage Hillel, of course.

Both the Swedish retail giant and the far-left political group are using “If not now, when?” the rhetorical question found in Chapters of Our Fathers [Pirkei Avot]: H&M as a T-shirt slogan and JVP as a hashtag.

A large billboard in Times Square features Hillel’s urgent question, the third in a series after “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I?” written in oversized black letters on a slinky tank top selling for $9.95. But the t-shirt isn’t in the store.

“That’s been one of our most popular items this summer,” said Kiera Elliott, H&M saleswoman in Times Square, who explained the shirt’s conspicuous absence from sale-racks. “We sold that item out weeks ago, but people keep asking me about it. It obviously made a lasting impression.”

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The Mikveh Lady Has Left The Building

The Mikveh, Lady

by DeDe Jacobs-Komisar for MayyimHayyimBlog.com

I’m going to be honest – before I found this place I was totally ambivalent about the mikveh. Growing up Orthodox, we teenage girls were taught to venerate the mikveh as a mysterious, holy, beautiful thing.

We toured mikva’ot on school and camp field trips, where mikveh ladies would show us how gorgeous the rooms were, how intimate and spa-like the experience. That we would immerse monthly, for niddah, after marriage, was a foregone conclusion that did not even require discussion.

I confess that I barely remember my first immersion, which was the night before my wedding. I recall meticulously running down the checklist of preparations, worrying that I forgot something and that I wasn’t clean enough. My next memory is of emerging from the mikveh itself, underwhelmed. Was there something wrong with me? I shrugged it off and figured it would get better with time.

It didn’t. I’ve been married almost ten years now, and in that time, I’ve been to mikva’ot in four states and two countries. Nice ones, not-so-nice ones, nice mikveh ladies, intimidating mikveh ladies, one who yelled at me for not cutting my nails short enough. One who came equipped with her own cart of wipes and proceeded to, unasked, wipe my face down to remove any errant makeup.

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Busting the Shtetl Myth

What you think you know about Jewish life in Eastern Europe is wrong, argues a fascinating (but problematic) new book.

By Andrew N. Koss in Mosaic Magazine

“Deconstructing Fiddler on the Roof” is a favorite gambit of professors introducing students to the history of East European Jewry: begin with what they think they know about life in the shtetl, and then start busting the myths. Were matchmakers women? (No.) Did Russian police instigate pogroms? (Rarely, if ever.) Is there a single documented case of shtetl residents singing “Sunrise, Sunset” at a wedding? (Come on.)

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, a historian at Northwestern University, has given us a vigorous, well-documented, and entertaining new version of this trick in his recent The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe. In fact, he uses Fiddler on the Roof as a foil, beginning and ending with references to the musical while devoting the bulk of the book to everyday shtetl life in the half-century from 1790 to 1840.

The word shtetl refers to the small market towns where, for several centuries, a large portion of East European Jews lived. (The shtetl was a “Jewish town” only in the sense that Jews usually made up about half the population; it was not in any sense a ghetto.) The story of the shtetl begins in the second half of the 17th century, when Jews in Poland-Lithuania began to forsake the countryside for population centers that were assuming growing importance as hubs of commerce and manufacture, linking agricultural villages to major trade routes. Encouraged by the Polish nobility, Jews played a crucial role in these activities throughout the 18th century. When, between 1772 and 1795, Russia, Prussia, and Austria systematically dismembered their hapless neighbor, Poland-Lithuania, the majority of shtetls came under Russian rule. It is these that form the focus of Petrovsky-Shtern’s book.

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