How designer mezuzah covers and Torah pointers are putting the ‘Jew’ into ‘Jumanji’
For Lisa Van Allsburg and her husband Chris, Judaica is a family affair
ritual
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Community Readers share how they turn Saturday into Shabbat
Hot cocoa from the bible, bluegrass and opera, sleeping late and cleaning house
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Culture Can Shabbat be #self-care? For me, the answer was yes — maybe
Sometimes, when I quit Slack and stow away my laptop on a Friday afternoon, I go on Instagram and scroll through pictures of challah. Plain challah, rainbow challah, challah embellished with candied flowers. Hefty, round challah and etiolated mini challahs scattered artfully across a pristine baking sheet. Challah posed next to minimalist Shabbat candlesticks or…
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Fast Forward Ritual Slaughter Of Animals Officially Banned In Belgium
(JTA) — A ban in Belgium on the Jewish and Muslim methods of ritual slaughter of animals will go into effect on New Year’s. The Flemish Region, whose capital is Antwerp, passed the measure in July 2017 over vociferous objections by faith community leaders. It becomes effective on Jan. 1. A similar ban in the Walloon…
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Life The Forward Guide To The Mikveh
Most religions, including the “big three” (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), incorporate water as a means of ritually cleansing the body for religious practice. And in Judaism, the mikveh is a ritual bath filled with rain water used for a variety of purposes, including conversion, marital purity, immersing newly acquired utensils, and preparation of the body…
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Fast Forward Are Jewish Parents Opting Out Of Circumcision?
Some Jewish parents are cutting out one of Judaism’s oldest traditions: the bris. The bris — the ritual circumcision of Jewish boys at eight days old — goes back to the story of Abraham, who circumcised himself and his firstborn son. But some modern Jewish parents are foregoing the ceremony. “Right now, there is a…
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Opinion Let’s Create New Jewish Rituals To Cope With the Trump Era
In the wake of this toxic election season and its deeply destabilizing outcome, many people have been scrambling for ways to react, to process and to organize. From this environment of confusion, many small Jewish grassroots efforts have sprung up, trying to find ways to understand and react to a new world — through the…
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Opinion We Need a New Jewish Ritual for the Terminally Ill
We live in a time when dying increasingly plays out in stages. More and more of those who fall seriously ill have, if not an exact schedule of life’s end, at least a realistic timeline. So it was with a friend of mine who’d been diagnosed with an unusual type of brain tumor in her…
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