Odds & Ends

During the month of Elul — the 29-day atonement period that falls in September this year and is meant to prepare Jews for the Days of Awe — a growing number of synagogues and Jewish groups are using the Internet as a tool to help Jews reflect. From Southern California to New York City, some congregations and Jewish activists have created Web-based programs in an effort to engage their constituents in the process of soul-searching. Using the Internet as a tool of High Holy Day reflection is the latest example of the expansion of Jewish life on the Web. In the case of Elul, the Internet is being tapped as a way to engage a broader swath of Jews in holiday preparation, as well as to help foster a stronger sense of community. Still, some observers — even proponents of the technology’s fusion with Judaism — note that there is…

If you ever wondered which are the most read articles on this website, below are the top 12, including the date of posting and the number of readers. These articles have the advantage of being posted from the earliest days of the website redesign and have had the most exposure. Keep in mind that these numbers include visitors from all around the world! To make the statistics more interesting, the "Most Popular" list on the Home page was redesigned to be the "Most Popular in the Last Two Months". Now you can see which articles have been most popular recently. If you linger with your cursor on a title, you will see a small pop-up with the number of readers. Have a look.1  About TBS (2007-08-01 21:32:33)  2051 2  Contribute (2007-08-16 12:37:51)  971 3  Men's Club (2007-08-01 22:44:45)  938 4  Sisterhood (2007-08-01 22:46:45)  912 5  Judaic Media Links (2007-08-01 22:43:07) …

click triangle to start movie The Consulate General of Israel filmed five fifth-grade students from New York [Bronx Middle School] reading the story that Shalit wrote when he, too, was eleven years old. “Gilad was a boy our age when he wrote this story; if only we could write something so significant at this age. Today, no one knows where he is and he probably misses his parents,” said one of the students. “If the shark and fish can make peace, why can’t people?”

A great many Jews know the story of how the Danes rescued 8,000 Jews from the Nazis by smuggling them to Sweden in fishing boats. Very few Jews know the story of how all 50,000 Bulgarian Jews were saved. Not a single Bulgarian Jew was deported to the death camps, due to the heroism of many Bulgarians of every walk of life, up to and including the King and the Patriarch of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.In 1999, Abraham Foxman, the National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, flew with a delegation to Sophia to meet the Bulgarian Prime Minister. He gave the Prime Minister the first Bulgarian-language copy of a remarkable book, Beyond Hitler's Grasp, written in 1998 by Michael Bar Oar, a professor at Emory University (a Bulgarian Jew who had immigrated to Israel and then to the USA). This book documents the rescue effort in detail. The ADL paid…

The book is available in some local libraries.

The Tent-Peg Business:Some Truths About CongregationsBy Rabbi Lawrence Kushner1.    If synagogues were businesses, their product would be Jews.  The more Jews they could manufacture from otherwise illiterate, assimilated, and un-self aware members, the more successful they would be.  That is (to continue the metaphor) the bottom line.  Simply getting together with other Jews may be ancillary and even indispensable to this ultimate goal, but it can just as easily be -- as is often the case when Jews get together to watch a movie, eat dinner, or play tennis -- a pleasant way to pass time.2.    Jews need one another, and therefore congregations, to do primary religious acts which they should not, and probably cannot, do alone.  Doing primary religious acts is the only way we have of growing as Jews.  Consequently, it is also the only justification for the existence of a congregation.  Everything else congregations do, Jews can…

I was watching an episode of Doctor Who called the Forest of the Dead. Doctor Who is an alien, the last of his people. He travels through time and space and solves problems and rights wrongs. In this episode, he comes across the universe's biggest library containing every book ever written until the 51st century. The library is somewhat sentient and has the collective knowledge of the evolved “Internet”. At some point the Doctor is threatened and rather than explain why he should be the last person to be confronted, he suggests that the other entity look him up in the library. This library is the ultimate memorial book of all who are alive or died. It has a Jewish soul; nothing and no one is forgotten.Last July when I started to populate this new TBS website, I was deeply disappointed that our previous host managed to lose our old…

The Hoopoe is 25–29cm long, with a 44–48cm wingspan. This black, white and pink bird is quite unmistakable, especially in its erratic flight, which is like that of a giant butterfly. The crest is erectile, but is mostly kept closed. It walks on the ground like a starling.The song is a trisyllabic "oop-oop-oop", which gives rise to its English and scientific names.       Dirty, treif, but fit for a king, the hoopoe's our nat'l bird May. 29, 2008ADAM KREDO & GREER FAY CASHMAN , THE JERUSALEM POST Our newly crowned national bird, the hoopoe, may not be kosher or particularly hygienic, but it is fit for a king. Hailed on Thursday by the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel as the ideal choice for the honor, the hoopoe, known in Hebrew as duchifat, holds an ambiguous position in Hebrew scriptures. Due to its association with King Solomon, the bird is…

To commemorate Israel's 60th anniversary, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs is publishing excerpts from "Showdown in the Oval Office," the first chapter of Counsel to the President, the memoirs of Clark Clifford with Richard Holbrooke, published in 1991, that describes in detail the drama in Washington surrounding the Truman administration's then-controversial decision to recognize Israel."The Wise Men" Oppose U.S. Recognition of Israel, Of all the meetings I ever had with Presidents, this one remains the most vivid. Not only did it pit me against a legendary war hero whom President Truman revered, but it did so over an issue of fundamental and enduring national security importance - Israel and the Mideast, an issue as relevant and contentious today as it was then. The President regarded his Secretary of State, General of the Army George C. Marshall, as "the greatest living American." Yet the two men were on a collision course…

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