Bat Aliyah

Getting back to the " Responding to the Economic Crisis " controversy, I heard back from a local rabbi with whom I exchanged a ser...

One Bite At A Time: What To Do When You Find Yourself Considering Aliyah The old joke asks, “How do you eat an elephant?” “One bite at a tim...

What follows is a recent letter, written by a brilliant friend of mine. The letter writer is a deeply committed, unusually well-educated J...

THE SET UP In my copious spare time (ha!), I moderate a list called Geula Watch , in which list members share dvrei Torah, blog entries, lin...

On the one hand, I'm watching what's going on and, like the neilah service of Yom Kippur , I see the gates closing on American Jews....

Part One The time has come to leave Israel yet again. I walk through the apartment, kissing each mezuzah goodbye, as has become my custom. ...

We live in serious times. There are multiple simultaneous threats to the Jewish people. We are fighting a defensive war in Gaza against H...

These days, the preponderance of my email comes from Israel. When I first turned on my computer after Shabbat, I was in a state of warped c...

This is the cover of today's New York Post. The cover story is about Bernie Madoff and how he destroyed the finances of so many member...

Being a Jew in America right now is somewhat unsettling. Okay, that's a major understatement. Being a Jew with some sense of an impendin...

I have an Aliyah/Geula Playlist on my iPod. These are the songs that inspire me and I often play these when I'm cooking for Shabbat (w...

For the past few months, I have had what I thought was a recurrent fungal infection on my right foot. It clears and then returns and I can...

We live in serious times. World-wide financial crises, frequent natural disasters which claim tens of thousands of lives, Islamic fun...

In shul on Yom Kippur, we read Sefer Yonah at mincha time. Much of the sefer is about Yonah's attempt to escape from the job that Gd a...

Ha’azinu is third in a series of four weekly Torah readings in which Moshe delivers his final “State of the Union” address. The first 43 v...

The lines have been drawn in the sand and the stakes are getting higher. There are two schools of thought here: #1 True, this is a financial...

Disclaimer: I might be wrong. My husband recently encouraged me to gather a group of women together with whom I could talk about aliyah, mo...

The fact is, I really can't move to Israel just now. If you know me, you probably already know the reason. If you don't know me, i...

When I gave birth (excuse this tangent so early in the post, but I've always loved that expression "giving birth") to my firs...

I consistently trade powerful words of Torah and chizuk with my spiritual sisters in Israel by email. Usually, we send each other inspiring...

I am obsessed with geula. I get like this. I've had many intellectual obsessions before, so I recognize the symptoms. I get an itch, a...

It's hit me. I'm back in galut a full week now, and a couple of days ago, the mourning period began. Once again, I'm grieving....

One way of understanding Jewish life is that the whole system, all the mitzvot, all the Torah, all the Jewish avenues for improving one’s ch...

Hashem put so many challenges in the way of my leaving Israel this time that it makes me wonder if He was purposefully distracting me so I w...

We went to a chad-pa'ami store, which basically sells upscale disposable tableware. The reason I wanted to go to this store was to sto...