Palestine’s First Jewish Feminist

When Pesha Dzimitrovsky, the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi in British Palestine, turned 15 in 1921, her schooling was over—or would have been, had she remained in Jerusalem. So her parents shipped her off to boarding school in Weimar-Republic Frankfurt. The move would be her first step in a lifetime of country-hopping and flouting gender expectations.

"Pesha's Journey," a small but powerful exhibit up through the end of May at the University of Michigan's Frankel Center, draws from Pesha's worldly, energetic life, in the form of love letters, newspaper clippings that track the fate of Europe's Jews, and her husband Benno's photos. The couple left Frankfurt for New York just before Hitler was elected Chancellor.

In these artifacts, Pesha details her reading of Schiller and Ibsen, discusses "modern marriage" with her husband-to-be, and supports a court decision allowing the sale of contraceptives. In a photograph taken before she left Palestine, Pesha's gaze is so serious and direct we can't help but wonder how her life—and her country—might have been different had she stayed.

Women on the Verge

A matchmaker schools a young woman on how to make gefilte fish for a potential mate. A high school girl plans her future: balancing Shabbat preparations with her duties as Madam President.

These and other voices make up Shula Rosen's Women of Valor, a collection of monologues performed under the title "Chareidi Women Speak" at Jerusalem's Stage One Festival last spring. Rosen—the pseudonym used by this breakout playwright and fiction writer—studied theater at Kenyon College, Oxford, and at HB Studio in New York before becoming religious. Inspired by Eve Ensler and Anna Deavere Smith, Rosen based characters on friends and women she read about, looking to present a range of Orthodox women's perspectives not often shown in the media. "None of these women want out of their lives," she says.

A rich spectrum of Orthodox life also informs Rosen’s short fiction and a novel-in-progress. Religious women, she says, appreciated seeing characters like themselves in Women of Valor. Perhaps they identified with the dreams of Chana, the high school student, who says as she leaves for a baseball game, "Maybe I'll catch a fly ball and have it autographed. Or maybe I'll sign my own name."

Shabbos with the Penguins

We've grown so accustomed to Chabad-Lubavitch's ubiquity that it is no longer surprising to see Chabad houses popping up everywhere from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the Mediterranean archipelago of Malta. But not long ago, Chabad outdid even itself. Chabad traveled to Antarctica.
The mission was inspired by a network engineer named Dick Heyman who, 2 years earlier, led the continent's first Sabbath service. Chabad ambassador Meir Alfasi led the far-reaching mission armed with copies of the Tanya, the central text of Chabad pedagogy, and boxes stuffed with kosher bread and canned peas.
But in a land with no sunset, how did the Jews at the bottom of the world even know what time to light the Sabbath candles? They followed the times observed by the closest Jewish community, in Christchurch, New Zealand. While in other places with strange sun patterns, some follow the Jerusalem solar calendar, in this case, the choice was between Christchurch or Jerusalem, and what can we say? The Jews went with Christchurch.

Josephus and the First Mooning

Marking the new moon was God's first commandment to the Jewish people. But when was the first recorded mooning?

Incidentally, the famously self-aggrandizing ancient historian who brought us classics like The Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities, and Against Apion, had as good an eye for exposing Roman military stratagems as he did for exposing their, well, exposures.
In Book II, Chapter 12 of his 1st-century masterwork The Jewish War, Josephus tells of a Roman soldier exposing his nether regions to a crowd of Jews celebrating Passover. The soldier "pulled back his garment and, cowering down after an indecent manner, turned his breech to the Jews, and spake such words as you might expect upon such a posture." In other words, he passed gas.
The incident itself is funny—as is the fact that it's recorded so long ago—but the ensuing mayhem gives the act quite a different tenor. Riots broke out, the Roman military violently over-responded, and thousands of pilgrims died. This was one moonrise we wish hadn't happened.

ABC's of the Omer

The significance, customs and mechanics of counting the Omer

What is the Omer?
In the days of the Holy Temple, the Jewish people would bring a barley offering on the second day of Passover (Leviticus 23:10). This was called the "Omer" (literally, "sheaf") and in practical terms would permit the consumption of recently-harvested grains.

Starting on the second day of Passover, the Torah (Leviticus 23:15) says it is a mitzvah every day to "count the Omer" – the 50 days leading up to Shavuot. This is an important period of growth and introspection, in preparation for the holiday of Shavuot which arrives 50 days later.

Shavuot is the day that the Jewish people stood at Mount Sinai to receive the Torah, and as such required a seven-week preparation period. The commentators say that we were freed from Egypt only in order to receive the Torah and to fulfill it. Thus we were commanded to count from the second day of Pesach until the day that the Torah was given – to show how greatly we desire the Torah.

How to Count the Omer
The Omer is counted every evening after nightfall (approx. 30 minutes after sunset), which is the start of the Jewish 'day.' (In the synagogue it is counted toward the end of the Maariv service.) If a person neglected to count the Omer one evening, he should count the following daytime, but without a blessing.

To properly 'count the Omer,' you must say both the number of days and the weeks. For example:

On days 1-6, we say only the number of days. For example:
"Today is 4 days of the Omer."
On days which are complete weeks – e.g. 7, 14, 21 – we say as follows, for example:
"Today is 21 days, which is 3 weeks of the Omer."
On all other days, we say, for example:
"Today is 33 days, which is 4 weeks and 5 days of the Omer."

(Since you must recite the blessing before you count, don't mention the count for that night beforehand.)

Before counting, stand and say the following blessing:

Baruch ata Adonoy, Eloheinu melech ha-olam, asher kid'shanu be'mitzvo'sav ve-tzivanu al sefiras ha'omer.

Blessed are You, God, King of the Universe, Who made us holy with His commandments, and commanded us on the counting of the Omer.

Continue reading.

The Most Popular Jewish Picture

Twentieth-century Jewish-American homes tended to have one thing in common: a Jewish National Fund blue tzedakah box. According to a new book by Eliyahu Stern, a distinctive artifact linked 19th-century European-Jewish homes, too: the portrait of Rabbi Elijah of Vilna.

Elijah was known as the Vilna Gaon—the Genius of Vilna—and the popularity of his picture testified to his unparalleled intellectual reputation.

Born in 1720 to a rabbinic family in Slutsk, Elijah is said to have mastered biblical and Talmudic literature by early adolescence. Later, in Vilna, he led a reclusive life of study. When he died in 1797 he had commented on a wider array of classical Jewish texts than anyone in Jewish history.

After his death, Elijah's students and biographers sold his portrait to a Jewry that was finding its intellectual groove, navigating new educational opportunities in European schools and universities. Elijah was a role model for these aspiring geniuses, but the exact portrait people displayed depended upon their ideology. As Stern recently wrote in Slate: "The Orthodox painted him with phylacteries and a prayer shawl; the secularists left him in Polish garb, but as the Yiddish writer, Moses Gertz recalled, 'Every home in Lithuania was decorated with the picture of the Gaon.'"