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Joseph C. Kaplan

Dec 6, 2024, 10:27 AM

If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem

I ended a 2018 column about my first trip to Israel after a 10-year hiatus (“Micro and Macro of Israel Visit”) by noting “I’ll be back, please God, and much sooner than before.” While I was right, it wasn’t...

Moshe-Mordechai van Zuiden

Sep 24, 2024, 8:36 AM

Did the UN General Assembly agree: From River to Sea, Palestine must be free?

It does do damage. But in the first place, to the UN. In second place to the countries that approved of it. And no less to those that abstained. Just like the Holocaust was the moral downfall of the...

Jun 4, 2024, 5:19 AM

Liberating the Western Wall with a prayer book

IDF Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren holding a Torah scroll and blowing a Shofar next to the Western Wall (Courtesy: IDF Archives)

An impromptu prayer service was held that day in 1967 when Israel captured Jerusalem's Old City – there was just one item missing

Apr 26, 2024, 5:25 AM

Inches to Metric: To be or not to be (an Israeli American) that is the question? #4

This is part four in my series on becoming an Israeli American...For anyone interested in reading the entire series, go to my TOI header and click My Blog. The big dive Making Aliyah felt as if I were on the edge...

Shmuel Rabinowitz

Jan 18, 2024, 12:27 PM

A collective broken heart

We came together at the Western Wall in prayer and tears, and pierced the heavens. May that unity see us through this excruciating time

Joshua Hammerman

Sep 29, 2023, 1:35 AM

Israel’s Rosa Parks Moment

Egalitarian worship at the Kotel, near Robinson's Arch, 2010. (courtesy)

It’s stunning that when Israel’s current internal tensions spilled over into a full-fledged culture war, the match to ignite it was not abortion or LGBTQ rights, as it would be in America, or issues of religion and state that...

Jul 23, 2023, 5:46 PM

Tisha B’Av 2023. Let history not repeat itself

Service mourning the destruction of the Temple next to the Western Wall extension on Tisha B'Av. Photo(c)Tuvia Book, 2023

Let history not repeat itself. Witnessing the scenes in the week of Tisha B’Av in Jerusalem as Israel tears itself apart over the Judicial reform debate this week my mind is wanders back to what happened in this very...

David-Seth Kirshner

Jul 16, 2023, 7:11 AM

I went to synagogue and a hockey game broke out

As a mourner, attending synagogue with a minyan has been a priority. This Shabbat afternoon, when attending services for the close of the Sabbath, a fight broke out. Not a shouting match or a disagreement over who had better...

Michel M.J. Shore

Jul 12, 2023, 8:17 PM

A Grandfather’s Signature and His Granddaughter’s Prayer at the Wall

A Grandfather’s Signature and His Granddaughter's Prayer at the Wall dedicated to the Memory of my Father, Sigmond Shore, O.B.M He put a kippah on his gray-haired head. His hair had been gray for as long as I could remember. Slowly,...

Jun 26, 2023, 7:02 PM

Stairway to Heaven

Once, a student follower of Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk (Poland, 1787-1859) came to visit his spiritual mentor and guide. The Rabbi of Kotzk asked him to share inspiration from his father-in-law, a well-known Torah study author. “My father-in-law would...

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