Volunteering for a Jewish burial society showed me how to live a more sacred life
The work of a Chevra Kadisha is done without promotion or fanfare, and is solely for the benefit of the deceased
The work of a Chevra Kadisha is done without promotion or fanfare, and is solely for the benefit of the deceased
“Promise me you will help me die.” My father was 92 years old. He had congestive heart failure and COPD. He was living on oxygen and a dozen medications that had kept him alive since a debilitating stroke paralyzed him forty years ago. Last year, when his doctors told him that he was dying in…
JERUSALEM – Ten years ago, Aliza and Netanel Fenichel and their young children were in a car accident. Aliza, who was 25 weeks pregnant and badly injured, underwent an emergency cesarean section to save her life, and her unborn son’s. The boy weighed about a pound and a half and died the same day. “When…
Facebook is dead, long live Meta. But, actually, Meta is dead, too. Let me explain. On Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the new name for Facebook to mark its transition to what he calls “the metaverse.” The name, which is, perhaps unsurprisingly, Meta, doesn’t translate well. Unless that’s the point. While the word, now applied to…
Rabbi Shmuel David Weissmandl, a 69-year-old resident of the village of Mount Kisco in upstate New York, was one of the more than a dozen people who died from flooding that swept the New York region on Wednesday night. Weissmandl was driving home from Rockland County when his car was caught in high water near…
I am grieving. I am grieving the small seeds of hope for change I have witnessed over my time living in Israel. I am grieving as I sit with my Palestinian housemates, both of us afraid to leave the house for fear of rockets and rioting blazing through our community. I have enmeshed myself in…
Tommy Raskin was, by all accounts, a deeply empathetic individual, whether fighting on behalf of humans or animals. His father, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, wrote in a statement published on Medium that his son “hated cliques and social snobbery, never had a negative word for anyone but tyrants and despots, and opposed all malicious…
(JTA) — Joan Micklin Silver, a pioneering female filmmaker who directed two of Hollywood’s most Jewish films, has died at 85. The cause was vascular dementia, according to The New York Times. Silver was best known for directing “Crossing Delancey,” the Lower East Side rom-com involving a pickle maker, and “Hester Street,” an influential low-budget…