“I recently learned that my mother’s mother’s mother was Jewish,” she wrote in her email. Apparently Cynthia’s grandmother had converted to Catholicism before World War II as anti-Semitism was rising. (Her great-grandmother had perished in the Holocaust.) Cynthia understood that although she was raised Catholic, according to Jewish law, she was considered a Jew. Despite […]
Sorrow. Anger. Numbness. Disbelief. Those are the emotions that have been swirling around inside me ever since I heard the news two nights ago that a group of men who were praying in a synagogue in Har Nof (a neighborhood I lived in for a year when I was nineteen) were literally butchered to death […]
As a child, I had a recurring dream that I was in the Holocaust. Twenty-five years later, much of it is hazy, except for the intense fear of trying to escape from pursuers who considered it a crime to be Jewish. I wondered if this was a common thing. “Do you think most Jews have […]
The shloshim (the end of the thirty day mourning period) for Eyal, Gilad, and Naftali – the boys in Israel who were kidnapped and killed by terrorists last month – was yesterday. There is a question I have been wondering about ever since their bodies were discovered and the tape of their phone call to the […]
When my husband and I got married in August 2000 (happy almost anniversary to us!), we had a plan to learn Torah in Israel as a way to start our marriage off on a meaningful note. We first had to finish college and save up some money in order to make this dream happen, but […]
The other day, upon returning from a trip to the supermarket, groceries in tow (or rather in hand), I realized that I had left my keys at home. But just then, wouldn’t you know, one of our neighbors walked through the lobby at the exact right moment to catch my flailing arms in his peripheral vision. “Hashgacha prutis” (Divine Providence) I […]
