You’re not religious, and you’re in mourning. Here’s how to make Jewish rituals work for you.
Some advice: "Find the memory you'd like to bring to the occasion."
Mourning
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News They lost pregnancies or infants. Now, Israeli parents want access to burials that have long been secret
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…
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Culture Sitting Shiva for Spot?
As I peer down at her cotton-puff head, my sense of guilt sets in. Peeps, my bichon frise associate, has just taken a cocktail of three different medicines meant to keep her ticker ticking. Her eyes water, and her mouth turns downward, quivering slightly. It’s obvious she is not digging this new regimen. At 13,…
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Community When a shiva is cut short
Shiva, the traditional Jewish mourning period for close relatives, is normally seven days long. It makes sense that shiva should be seven days. Seven (shiva in Hebrew) is a number with special significance in Judaism. The seven-branched menorah, a symbol of Judaism since ancient times. The seven times a bride circles the groom at the…
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Fast Forward Jewish Twitter claps back at Christian-inflected condolences for RBG
Twitter users who applied seemingly Christian terminology and concepts to the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg came under fire over the weekend, as Jewish internet users and their allies struggled to process the death of the Jewish Supreme Court justice. Some questioned the use of the term “RIP,” which is used in many Christian services…
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Community This Tisha B’Av, remember John Lewis
It’s Tisha B’av – the darkest day in the Jewish calendar. We remember the destruction. We mourn the loss of the First and Second Temples. We recall Crusades and pogroms that happened on this same day in years gone by. And each year, after the fasting and the mourning of Tisha B’av, comes Shabbat. This…
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Archive From the archive, Influenza 1918: Reb Velvele’s shiva adjustments
October 28, 1918, the Forverts published what is likely their first rabbinic pronouncement on the influenza epidemic. Written by New York’s Chief of the Rabbinic Courts, Rabbi Gavriel Zev Margolis, it could be found above the fold, technically speaking, but on the very last page of the secular Yiddish Forverts. The informal, chatty headline made…
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The Schmooze Naomi Campbell And Paula Abdul Pay Tribute To…The Lubavitcher Rebbe
25 years ago this week, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the leader of the Chabad Hassidic movement who some Jews believe to be the messiah, died. Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, a biographer of Schneerson, who was known to his followers as The Rebbe, says, “He really established what is, as far as I know, the first attempt…
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