Their Mission: Prepare 1,500 Kosher Meals, Send to Antarctica It seemed like a dream job for a young Montreal caterer: provide all the meals for what was billed as the first organized kosher Antarctica cruise. When the American tour operator contacted Shua Lurie of L’Orchidée Traiteur, a kosher catering company in Montreal, about eight months […]

Chanukah is a time of revolution.  At the first Chanukah, the Maccabees led a revolution to preserve Judaism against the Hellenists. Then, hundreds of years later, on Shabbat Chanukah of 1915, a poor Hasidic woman started a new revolution to preserve Judaism. This revolution would spark one of the greatest innovations in Jewish life. Her story […]

What’s it like to be Jewish and work at Google? While the holidays are often celebrated by the “Jewglers,” as they are known, Chanukah is particularly special. Google itself has shared photos from its offices in New York, Tel Aviv, Mountain View and Dublin, showing employees celebrating the holiday. Menorahs are displayed, made of cool […]

My paternal grandfather’s family assimilated so long ago that my great-great-grandmother used to spoil my grandfather by sneaking him pork chops in place of veal chops! Only one of my four grandparents was raised religious – my mother’s father. But like the rest of my recent ancestors, he too walked away from the ways of […]

In the 1940’s, Vered Ben Sa’adon’s Dutch grandmothers grew up close to one another in terms of distance, yet were living worlds apart. As teenagers, one of them hid from the Nazis while the other aided them. Like Anne Frank, her paternal grandmother, Liesje de Vries, not only lived in hiding for years, she also wrote […]