I have an aunt named Malkah who I may never know, because she was kidnapped from a Jerusalem hospital in 1961. I didn’t even know that Malkah existed until two years ago when my grandmother, Aisha Biton, passed away, and a chapter of her life, hidden for most of mine, came into the open. Aisha…
In a previous piece in these pages, I discussed the importance of the semantics of traditional Jewish female names. In various countries, Jewish women have often had personal names with pleasant meanings in their local, everyday language. At first glance, that doesn’t seem to be the case for Jewish men. Indeed, since at least the…
The American Jewish Committee’s recent survey has already sparked considerable debate over the future of the Jewish people — indeed, whether there even is a single Jewish people. Most concerning to many is the finding that American Jews and Israeli Jews have diverged to the point that while a majority of both groups see the…
Sometime in 1943, a 35-year-old architect sat at a drafting desk on the third floor of the headquarters building in the infamous Janowska concentration camp in Lviv in what is now Ukraine. Over 80,000 Jews were murdered at this camp and it served as the main deportation center for 160,000 Jews of Lviv (a number…
A few months ago, one of my acquaintances asked me why, in traditional Jewish communities, women tend to have secular names and men tend to have Hebrew names. This person is deeply knowledgeable about the Jewish culture and languages spoken by Jews, and she assumed it had something to do with the way that women…
(JTA) — President Donald Trump proclaimed May Jewish Heritage Month. In his statement issued by the White House on Monday, Trump said that “Jewish Americans have helped guide the moral character of our Nation.” President George W. Bush first proclaimed May Jewish Heritage Month in 2006, and it has been proclaimed annually by the sitting president ever since….
Dr. Howard M. Sachar, Professor Emeritus of History and International Affairs at George Washington University and author of numerous works of Jewish, Middle-Eastern and European history passed away on April 18, 2018, at the age of 90 at his home in Kensington, Maryland. He was born to Dr. Abram L. Sachar and his wife, Thelma…
AMSTERDAM (JTA) — The Jewish community of Deventer in the east of the Netherlands is protesting a Dutch-Turkish entrepreneur’s plan for transforming their former synagogue into a restaurant. Tom Fürstenberg, chairman of Deventer’s Beth Shoshanna Jewish community, made up of several dozen members, told the regional newspaper De Stentor that it would be “scandalous” if…
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