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 […]
“I can’t fall asleep,” my son told me as he walked into my room one evening last week. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “We watched a movie about the Holocaust today in camp,” he explained. The Holocaust, I thought – giving Jewish children nightmares since the Holocaust. It was the right thing to show at camp, since […]
Anne Frank House Banned Orthodox Jewish Employee From Wearing His Skullcap at Work A Jewish employee at Anne Frank House could not believe his ears when his bosses banned him from wearing a skullcap at work. Barry Vingerling turned up for work on his first day at the museum in Amsterdam and was told to […]
Not every part of the Torah easily comports with science and reason. Not every part of Jewish law is simple to understand in modern times. Perhaps that is why in our age of increasing skepticism Hashem granted us something as miraculous as the State of Israel. The challenges in Judaism don’t go away, but modern […]
Dr. Julius Kuhl should be as famous as the protagonist of Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award-winning Holocaust movie, but after saving up to two thousand lives (Oskar Schindler saved 1600), this modest hero was not looking for recognition. Post-World War II, Kuhl settled in Toronto with his family where he ran a construction company and lived in […]
Thirsty for Wisdom of the Body, Finding It in Dance Rabbi Hanania Schwartz and Yuval Azoulay covered their heads with yarmulkes and mumbled a blessing before sipping from their water bottles. Then, yarmulkes off, they began to perform a short dance. The excerpt is from “Heroes,” which was performed at the JCC Manhattan when the […]
