At the age of 23, Oscar, a college student in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, was looking forward to a professional soccer career. Then came the January 2010 earthquake that changed his life. The campus building he was in collapsed — most of his friends were buried under the rubble — and Oscar, who asked to be identified…
In the five years leading up to the deal freeing Gilad Shalit, the Israeli nation adopted his family as its own, sharing its pain and campaigning for its cause. Meanwhile, the family of Pavel Slotzker was all but forgotten. Shalit’s comrade, Slotzker was a victim of the same cross-border raid in which militants abducted Shalit,…
When a massive 9.0 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Eastern Japan earlier this year, the staff at Fuji Youchien kindergarten in the small town of Yamamoto followed well-rehearsed regulations. They quickly took all the children outside to the parking lot. After a few minutes, with the ground still shaking and rain pouring down,…
As I raced through scales to warm up my piccolo, an old man with an oxygen tube in his nose smiled at me. “I love the piccolo,” he said. The man, a retired congregational rabbi, sat front row center in the social hall of an assisted living home, as a handful of members from my…
About a month after her father passed away in 2006, Linda Cohen awoke in the middle of the night with an idea. Cohen had been looking for a better way to grieve for her father, one that would both honor his generosity and improve the world around her — something that went beyond saying Kaddish…
As early immigrants to what is now Israel were learning how to communicate in a revived ancient language, the hard-of-hearing among them were creating a new language altogether. Combining signs from most all of the different countries from which the Jewish populations emigrated, Israeli Sign Language began to take shape in the 1930s. Around the…
It had to be one of the most moving reality TV moments. On September 4, seconds before 18-year-old Holon resident Diana Golbi was crowned winner of “Kokhav Nolad,” Israel’s version of “American Idol,” program makers revealed how she had started on the road to national stardom. They showed a clip of her making a visit,…
Jews make more donations than people of other religions to “basic needs” causes, which are those that focus on food, shelter and other fundamental necessities, according to a recent study comparing philanthropic patterns among Americans of different faiths. The study, by Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis economics professor Mark Ottoni Wilhelm, analyzed data that is…
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