College students design tefillin for women

From JPost.com

Shenkar College’s Concoction Week takes place this week; all third year students from both the college’s faculties of design and engineering are participating in a range of workshops.

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Students from the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design in Ramat Gan have created tefillin for women as part of a workshop called The Manipulative Past in the institute’s third annual Concoction Week taking place this week.

Three students – Tut Sagi, a student in the college’s department for multidisciplinary art, Avior Tzvi of the department of plastics engineering, and Valeria Simhovitz from the department of design and fashion – collaborated on the project.

Tefillin are a set of two black boxes made of hardened leather which in Jewish law are supposed to be worn by Jewish men every day during the morning prayer service.

The requirement for the workshop was to take a handmade item from ancient technology, games or tradition and to transform it into something of the present or future. Most of the participants chose to recreate an ancient game, piece of jewelry or form of technological development, from the field of games, but Sagi, Tzvi and Simhovitz decided to take something from the realm of tradition, “something that has existed for many years and is still very relevant today.”

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Spelunkers Stumble Upon Rare 2,300-Year-Old Treasure Cache

In one of the most important finds in northern Israel, three cave explorers unearth ancient coins and jewelry in stalactite cave.

By Ari Yashar for Arutz7Sheva

A month after the discovery of a massive hoard of gold treasure by divers off the coast of Caesarea, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) has received reports of a find involving a cache of rare coins and silver and bronze objects 2,300 years old, in a cave in northern Israel.

According to IAA officials, this may be one of the most important archaeological discoveries in northern Israel in recent years, and requires in-depth research to decipher the secrets of the cave.

The story of the find begins two weeks ago, when Israeli Caving Club members Reuven Zakai, his son Chen, and their friend Lior Halony, journeyed into one of the largest and best-hidden stalactite caves in the north in preparation for a visit by the club.

The three spelunkered down into the cave, crawling through a narrow passage to enter it where they explored for several hours.

Chen, 21-years-old, says he forced his way into a narrow niche when he caught sight of something shining in the dark. He discovered two ancient silver coins that, it turns out, date from the reign of Alexander the Great, who conquered Israel at the start of the Hellenistic period (late 4th century BCE).

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Rabbi Bouskila’s “To Unite, Not to Divide: Rav Ouziel’s Big Sephardic Ideas”

From Sephardi Ideas Monthly

Rav Ben-Zion Meir Hai Ouziel (1880-1953) was a visionary rabbinic leader, a strong promoter of Jewish unity, and the 20th century’s most authentic embodiment of the classic Sephardic rabbinic tradition. His leadership was characterized, on the one hand, by a burning desire to abolish divisions between Jews, yet at the same time he was committed to promoting Sephardic Judaism. How did he reconcile these seemingly conflicting agendas?

As the Haham Bashi (Ottoman-appointed Chief Rabbi) of Jaffa-Tel Aviv (1911-1939), and then as the Rishon L’Zion of the pre-state Yishuv (1939-1947) and of the State of Israel (1948-1953), Rav Ouziel was officially the “Sephardic Chief Rabbi of the Land of Israel”. But despite holding an official title and position that seems to have ethnic and particularistic overtones, Rav Ouziel was an outspoken proponent of Jewish unity. He passionately sought to abolish the traditional ethnic divisions amongst Jews, especially in Israel. His push for Jewish unity was persistent and thorough, and he articulated his vision of Jewish unity in many forums, including public addresses, written position papers and halakhic rulings. From his earliest moments as a young rabbinic leader, all the way through to his famous “Spiritual Will to the Jewish People” written a few weeks before his death in 1953, Rav Ouziel advocated Jewish unity as an ideal position.

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Why Don't the British Like Israel?

by Alexander H. Joffe The Times of Israel/in Middle East Forum

A recent poll shows that Britons regard Israel less favorably than any other country besides North Korea. The results came as a shock to Israelis and supporters of Israel, but they shouldn't have. After all, British supporters of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement are widespread, blood libels about the Palestinian 'genocide' and Israeli organ harvesting are heard from members of the peerage, and Israel remains one of the few countries the British royal family hasn't visited.

True, Jews are deeply integrated into British society and have felt secure for decades. But incidents of antisemitic violence have been escalating and even notables like the Jewish director of television of the BBC have expressed fear about the future of Jews in the country. Antisemitism, interwoven and often indistinguishable from anti-Zionism, has reemerged full force. New statistics on antisemitic incidents prove that the British climate is changing for the worse.

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‘By the rivers of Babylon’ exhibit breathes life into Judean exile

Never-before-showcased clay tablets documenting the first diaspora go on display at Jerusalem’s Bible Lands Museum

BY ILAN BEN ZION for The Times of Israel

We know they sat on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, and that they wept. But a new exhibit at Jerusalem’s Bible Lands Museum puts faces and names to the Judean exiles in ancient Babylonia 2,500 years ago

“By the Rivers of Babylon” showcases a collection of about 100 rare clay tablets from 6th century Mesopotamia that detail the lives of exiled Judeans living in the heartland of the Babylonian Empire. Through these mundane Akkadian legal documents written in cuneiform, scholars have breathed life back into generations of Judeans who lived in Babylon but whose names and traditions speak of a longing for Zion.

The Al-Yahudu tablets are part of a private collection that has never before gone on public display. Their provenance is unknown; they likely turned up somewhere in southern Iraq, but no one knows when. After decades on the antiquities market they ended up in the hands of a private collector, David Sofer, who offered to loan them to the Bible Lands Museum. After two years of labor, the exhibit is opening to the public on Sunday.

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The ideological roots of media bias against Israel

by Matti Friedman for FathmJournal.org

On 26 January 2015 the former AP reporter Matti Friedman delivered the keynote speech at BICOM’s annual dinner in London. Expanding on a widely-noted argument first set out in Tablet and The Atlantic, Friedman spoke about how the media dissect and magnify Israel’s flaws while purposely erasing those of its enemies. He spoke about a fashionable and extravagant disgust for Israel among many in the West, and the rise of a ‘cult of the Occupation’ which positions Jewish arrogance and perfidy at the heart of all the problems of the Middle East.

One night several years ago, I came out of Bethlehem after a reporting assignment and crossed through the Israeli military checkpoint between that city and its neighbour, Jerusalem, where I live. With me were perhaps a dozen Palestinian men, mostly in their 30s – my age. No soldiers were visible at the entrance to the checkpoint, a precaution against suicide bombers. We saw only steel and concrete. I followed the other men through a metal detector into a stark corridor and followed instructions barked from a loudspeaker – ‘Remove your belt!’ ‘Lift up your shirt!’ The voice belonged to a soldier watching us on a closed-circuit camera. Exiting the checkpoint, adjusting my belt and clothing with the others, I felt like a being less than entirely human and understood, not for the first time, how a feeling like that would provoke someone to violence.

Consumers of news will recognise this scene as belonging to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which keeps the 2.5 million Palestinians in that territory under military rule, and has since 1967. The facts of this situation aren’t much in question. This should be an issue of concern to Israelis, whose democracy, military, and society are corroded by the inequality in the West Bank. This, too, isn’t much in question.

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‘Yoetzet’ or rabbi?

Harry Maryles, Opinion, in The Times of Israel

Rabbi Shlomo Riskin is an Modern Orthodox Rabbi who does not compromise his principles. He showed his mettle when at age 23 was approached by New York’s Lincoln Square Synagogue (LSS) to serve as their spiritual leader. LSS was a Conservative Shul and did not have a Mechitza at the time. His condition was that they install a Mechitza and the Shul become Orthodox. They agreed and the Shul has been Orthodox since

Rabbi Riskin has many other accomplishments – including being in the forefront of the movement to free soviet Jewry in the 60s and 70s. An ardent Religious Zionist, he made Aliya in 1982 and settled in the city of Efrat where he serves with distinction as Chief Rabbi to this day.  He prides himself as a student of Rav Joseph Dov Solovietchik who gave him Semicha.

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