Bat Aliyah

Traditionally, the set of blessings we say in the morning are understood as thanking God for meeting our basic, daily needs. When I was preg...

NOTE: CLICK ON ANY PHOTO TO GET A LARGER VERSION. I've been privileged to be visiting Israel for close to a month now. Each day, I see ...

It's July and aliyah season is upon us. All around me, people are clearing out the detritus of their American lives, sending lifts, tal...

A few years ago, I bought a book in Jerusalem's Old City. When I got it home, I realized that the book was part of a 2-volume set. I h...

Like a lot of religious Zionist families in the Diaspora, we sent our daughter to spend the year after her high school graduation learning ...

Parshat Beha’alotcha 5769 This week’s Torah reading comes just before the famous incident of the Biblical spies. The Jewish people have al...

It seems I'm having "the aliyah conversation" with more and more people lately. Sometimes, I remark that this must be what wa...

Much of this week's portion covers various forms of skin eruptions, called tzara'at, that result from speaking lashon hara, gossip o...

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...