Judaism 101

Rabbi Samson will teach a special 32-session course designed for bar mitzvah boys that will provide an overview on the 613 mitzvot, with a concentration on the daily mitzvot such as prayer and those related to Shabbat. A parallel course for bat mitzvah girls will also be offered.

While his going OTD was painful for his mother, Boruch says she still accepted him – and worried more about the types of people he was hanging with.

When the Stern children wondered why marrying Jewish was so important, their parents struggled to answer.

In the vernacular of our sages and in our prayers, Pesach is titled, “Z’man chayrusaynu- Time of our freedom.” Although we did attain freedom at the time of our redemption from Egypt, titling the holiday as such doesn’t seem to encapsulate the root of the holiday’s greatness.

These are excerpts from the sefer “Inside Purim” which contains additional answers to the following questions and much more.

Here I am with everything. All of my facilities. Youth. Strength. Looks. Money. Degree of talent. Family. Health. And after all of that and more, I think I'm miserable? It can't be. Something's got to change.

Tina was in my kindergarten class last year. Each day Tina’s hair flew all around her. It would tumble into her eyes and she would bat at it periodically throughout the day just to see. Sometimes I’d use whatever hair accessory I had at hand - even just a rubber band - to put Tina’s hair out of her face.

“I liked Israel, and felt good being Jewish for the first time in my life.”

Nowadays, Jewish parents and educators must ask themselves how they can present Torah and mitzvot in a way that speaks to this generation. To many youth today, Judaism’s rich heritage seems outdated, irrelevant and boring.

The International Halacha Institute offers personalized online training in French, English, Hebrew and Spanish.

In Israel, most people are more careful to stress the end of the word (what’s called “mil’ra”), where it usually belongs for Hebrew words.

All of Shabbos centers around this one, primary idea: that we are enjoined to recall and internalize the fact that Hashem created the world in six days and rested on the seventh.

Though demography was not an exact science, Jews may have numbered several million in the early Roman Empire.  For more than a century before...

Nothing beats some preparation to make it a memorable Seder!

Throughout his month in Israel, Kalman realized he had found his home, in the beis medrash and in Eretz Yisrael.

You never know what event will spark a person's desire to return to Judaism. Art Sherman was an assimilated Jew married to a Polish Catholic woman. He owned a non-kosher Italian "hero sandwich shop" and an unbelievable comment, one day by his Rastafarian employee, sent him on a life-changing journey.

Purim is the holiday of contradictions and tenacity-driven-optimism: Grief replaced by joy; Esther's concealment replaced by the disclosure of her national/religious identity; Haman's intended genocide of the Jews replaced by redemption; Haman replaced by Mordechai; national and personal pessimism replaced by optimism.

"An animal also has an instinct to care for its young, but you are doing more than that. You are performing chesed, an act of kindness for another human being. Does it matter that he also happens to be your son?"

It didn't take long to understand the depths of the Torah lifestyle.

If you ask someone coming out of church on a Sunday, "Do you believe in G-d?" the worshipper will be shocked. "What type of question is that? Of course I do!"

The Jewish national period of mourning.

We recently layned Parshas Naso which contains the Biblical source for the obligation of a married woman to cover her hair. An eesha sotah is a woman whose husband suspects her of having acted immorally. The Torah commands the Kohein to take various steps to demonstrate that the sotah has deviated from the modest and loyal path of most married Jewish women (Rashi 5:15-27). Among the procedures, the pasuk clearly states: “ufora es rosh haisha…” and he shall uncover the hair of the head of the woman (5:18).

Among them was Aryeh Abramov, 17, who was to leave for a year in Israel two days later. “He was an all-around good person,” Abramov said, “he gave to all of us by always making the minyan, so it’s nice that I can be here and make a minyan for him.”

Shlomo Veingrad has traveled further for his speaking engagements than even during his days in the NFL, crisscrossing America and speaking around the world.

The author of the book Ronit Treatman, the daughter of Israeli diplomats who speaks several languages and lives in Philadelphia, was inspired to write the book after she became involved with the Bnei Anousim, the tens of millions of people around the world descended from forcibly converted Spanish and Portuguese Jews through the organization Reconectar.

The more we know and understand, the more focus and intention we put into our prayers, the more powerful they are.

Do you really care about your fellow Jew? Take the following test to see if your Ahavas Yisroel Quotient is on par with requirements established by Chazal.

Makom, a branch of the organization Jew In The City (JITC), was founded in 2014 by Allison Josephs, to help Jews who feel they no longer want to stay in their community of birth find a new community of choice – instead of leaving Judaism altogether in frustration.

Fast forward to 1977. Larry had already begun to become observant while in graduate school. When his PhD research flopped that year, Larry decided to pack his bags and headed to Eretz Yisrael to work on a kibbutz.

As a Baal Teshuva who discovered the “emes” about eight years ago, I am often asked by my FFB friends in my very FFB neighborhood to describe what inspired my wife and I to take the plunge and more specifically, what it feels like to lead a Torah observant life after so many years of living on the “other side.”