Eugene Markovitz of blessed memory was rabbi of Clifton Jewish Center in Clifton New Jersey. Thirty years ago, as part of a Halloween prank, four teenage boys defaced Rabbi Markovitz’s synagogue, Rabbi Markovitz’s home, a kosher meat market and the car of an elderly Jew. Using shaving cream and blue paint, the teenagers scrawled swastikas and Jewish stars along with […]
The Talmud tells us Rabbi Akiva was pretty much illiterate until the age of forty. Earning a meager living as a shepherd, he passed by a well and noticed a carved stone. He asked who carved this stone, and they told him that it was the water that constantly dripped on it. From this, he said: “if water was able […]
If people know anything about David Ben Gurion, it’s that he was the George Washington of the State of Israel. On May 15, 1948 corresponding to 5 Iyyar, 5708 (this year celebrations take place on Thursday,) David Ben Gurion proclaimed the birth of the State of Israel. What precious few don’t know about David Ben Gurion are the feverish activities […]
Mah Nishtannah? What makes this Yom HaShoah different from all previous Yom HaShoah commemorations? A little over three months ago President Andrzej Duda said that he would sign into law a bill making it illegal to accuse “the Polish nation” of complicity in the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities. In doing, so the President of Poland ultimately shed light on […]
Fifty years ago this week, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Black America was stunned and speechless. The sense of loss was beyond proportion. Words however did not fail some in the Jewish community. Among them was Arthur Waskow, who came up with a “Freedom Seder” […]
