ARZA

By Rabbi Stacey Blank I am back…after a few month hiatus.  A short explanation of what happened: As my readers may know, last summer I started working at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem.  Along the way, I became involved in young children/ family Shabbat programming  (Among other things, I have been living a long-time dream [...]

By Resa and Stanley Davids The distance between Rome and Jerusalem (according to Wikipedia) can be calculated as 2307 kilometers, or 1434 miles, or 1246 nautical miles.  In 1862, Moses Hess saw those distances quite differently.  Though Hess’ name may not be familiar to most of us today, he nevertheless played a significant role in [...]

By Rabbi Jackie Mates-Muchin Praying with the Women of the Wall is a very unique experience. On Rosh Chodesh Adar, I joined 200 other people packed into the very back part of the women’s section with a dozen men standing on chairs on the men’s side in order to participate in the service. Most of [...]

By Resa and Stanley Davids According to Wikipedia, Nate Silver is a statistician, sabermetrician, psephologist and writer.  Two words in the previous sentence were rejected by our Google spell-check; truth be told, we needed to track the meaning of those same two words in an online dictionary.  Silver became famous in the United States in [...]

Today is Election Day in Israel, and members of the Kibbutz Lotan community are taking part in the process. While adults vote in the national elections, the kids are learning how the system works by running mock elections in their groups. Community members are also voting for new leadership of the kibbutz. It’s a very [...]

By Susan Fritsch Cohen The following poem was written by Susan Fritsch Cohen on a recent trip to Israel with Northern Virginia Hebrew Congregation. Of the trip, Susan said, “Our congregational trip had a transformative effect on me — it solidified my connection with Israel and with the community I traveled with, and that inspired me [...]

By Persephone Rivka and Sophie Vener In permaculture, Bill Mollison advises all gardeners and farmers to live in a tent on their land for a year before they start their design for one reason: observation. When immersed in a place, one can best observe important elements such as the amount of rainfall, where the water [...]

By Galit Roichman On Thursdays between 2:00-5:00 PM I can be found in world repair. It’s less strange than it sounds. Tikkun Olam (repairing the world), in addition to being a key idea in Jewish discourse, is the name of a service-learning program that offers Jewish young adults from around the world an in-depth experience [...]

By Rabbi Stacey Blank If you happened to read my last post reflecting on the rocket attack on Israel, I ended with a question: What can I do? I was happy to receive a call from the Israeli Reform Movement who wanted to organize a group to go down to Ashkelon, which is located 10 [...]

On his recent trip to Israel as part of the Conference of Presidents solidarity mission, URJ President Rabbi Rick Jacobs visited a number of our Reform communities. One of the places he spent time was K’far Aza, where he talked to Chen Abrahams, Director of Development and Overseas Relations at the IMPJ.  In the video [...]