Spanish Golden Age
Spanish Golden Age1 Adar Ibn Ezra: While England was working to isolate and diminish the Jewish Community (see last week’s Blast from the Past), around the same time the Jews of Spain…
Birobidzhan: Jewish Utopia?
8 Adar So besides being my son, Zusha’s, birthday this Shabbat, what else has happened on this day in Jewish history? Can you believe that the Soviets tried to set up…
Stalin Was: A Return of the Haman
14 Adar Most of you heard about Purim in the days of Esther and Mordechai, which was about 2,376 years ago in Persia. A most fascinating thing happened about 2,308…
The Brothers “Rebbe Reb”
21 Adar So earlier this year I get a chance to write about Rebbe Reb Zusha and now I get to write about his brother Rebbe Reb Elimelech of Lizhensk (1717-1786) whose yahrzeit is…
Bartenura’s Journey to Jerusalem
7 Nissan This is not the story of the wine. Though this is from whom that delicious wine gets its name! On this Shabbat in 1488, Rabbeinu Ovadiah Bartenura arrived…
The Jewish King of Poland (for a day)
Often we think of Poland as a place of pain for the Jewish people. That might be true, but there are also a lot of positive things that happened in…
The Legendary Prime Minister Golda Meir
“We have been waiting for 2,000 years. Is that hurrying?” Golda Mabovitch’s birthday is this Shabbat. You probably think of her as Golda Meir, but she was born to Blume…
? Burn Baby Burn ? Third Reich Inferno
The Connection between Lag b’Omer and the end of the Nazis Y”S “Better for that man to make himself fall into a fiery furnace than to embarrass his neighbor publicly”…
The Story of the Dubno Maggid
17 Tevet Dubno Maggid: Today is the yahrzeit of Rabbi Jacob ben Wolf Kranz (1741-1804). He was known as the storyteller from Dubno a.k.a. “The Dubno Maggid.” This teacher is…
The Lasting Impact of the Baal haTanya
“There is love like fire, and there is love like water.”— The Baal haTanya 24 Tevet: Yehrzeit of the Baal haTanya: Today is the yahrzeit of Rabbi Shneur Zalman (ben Baruch) of…