You Don’t Have To Be Jewish To Love Shabbat Dinner

Thousands of Jerusalem’s non-Jewish tourists pay to enjoy a special meal they can’t find in any restaurant: Friday night dinner in a Jewish home

By Sara Toth Stub for Tablet Magazine


On a recent Friday evening in Jerusalem, more than a dozen participants from a Chinese business delegation snapped photos of each other waiting outside a house in Nachlaot, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood best known for the famed Machane Yehuda outdoor food market. At this hour, the market was shuttered and empty, and various renditions of the kiddush could be heard coming from the densely populated hodgepodge of newly renovated and dilapidated apartments stacked along the area’s winding alleyways.

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Seeing the Lower East Side plainly for what it really was

By Elliot Jager for The Villager
By the time I came on the scene in 1954, the Jewish Lower East Side was basically finished. I don’t mean to irk former Grand St. neighbors or more recently arrived denizens, but those who yearn nostalgically for the “good old LES” most likely had little firsthand experience of the real thing.

Irving Howe’s epic history of the East European migration to the United States, and of the LES as a landing point, is decidedly not a work of nostalgia. His evocative “World of Our Fathers” wraps up a good few years before my bar mitzvah when I was 13 by describing the dismal

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Guest Post: Living Life Alone

Posted by Rabbi Richard Address in Jewish Sacred Aging

For many of us, the “holiday season” begins with Rosh Hashanah, and moves on thru Yom Kippur, Thanksgiving, Chanukkah, Christmas, and finally New Year.

If we are fortunate, we have friends who are sensitive to our “family-less” situation, and invite us to be part of their celebrations and rituals.  I am always greatful for these invitations and enjoy being part of what are often boisterous, fun, memory filled days.  But there is a part of me that recognizes that I am different – an outsider looking in.  Without spouse or partner, children or grandchildren, I lack common ground.  And often, I return home with feelings of sadness and loneliness – that awful isolation that makes my apartment feel so empty.

Much is written about this.  But what about the rest of the year?  How does living alone and without family effect day to day living?

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Hollywood's Last Survivors

Seventy years ago, the Holocaust ended. Only 11 people who lived through it remain from the world of entertainment. Now, in gripping video testimonials, Oscar winners, actors, Dr. Ruth and even Judy Garland's hairstylist tell their personal stories, filled with hope and horror, one last time as their themes of genocide, displacement and discrimination continue to resonate today. Plus:The Roman Polanski interview

Produced by Peter Flax for The Hollywood Reporter

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AFTER 70 YEARS, THE UNITED NATIONS RECOGNIZES YOM KIPPUR AS AN OFFICIAL HOLIDAY

By Yair Rosenberg for Tablet Magazine   

On Friday, 70 years after its founding, the United Nations finally recognized the holiest day of the Jewish calendar as an official holiday. The designation ensures that no official meetings will take place on Yom Kippur, and that U.N. employees can choose not to work on it. Previously, Jews who wished to observe the penitential fast day were given no such dispensation, even as New York—the home of the U.N. headquarters—had long declared Yom Kippur to be a school holiday.

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Was Dead Man Too Jewish To Be Cremated?

Josh Nathan-Kazis for The Jewish Daily Forward   

When Martin Mendelsohn died in September, his brother’s plans to have the remains cremated ran into some surprising opposition: The Hasidic owner of the dead man’s retirement home sued to have the body buried instead.

Philip Schonberger, who runs the Evergreen Court Home for Adults, in Spring Valley, New York, thought Mendelsohn’s brother, Steven, was making a terrible mistake by opting for cremation.

“Why would a person who loved Judaism and practiced to the best of his ability want to be cremated?” Schonberger said. Cremation is strictly banned under Orthodox law.

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The Russian Jewish Ethnographer Behind A Trove of Stunning Historic Photographs

By Leah Falk for Jewniverse

The Vitebsk-born Shloyme Zaynvi Rapoport — better known by the moniker S. An-sky — was many things: publisher, playwright, tutor. But his most enduring legacy is twofold: his play The Dybbuk, which comprises what most people know of Yiddish literature outside the Singer family, and the exhaustive ethnographic expedition that inspired that play. With the expedition, An-sky aspired to chronicle the entirety of Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement in the early 1900s.

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