Tag: Berlin

Rav Tzvi Hirsh Levin, the rav of Berlin, was an extremely clever and sharp individual and possessed a remarkable sense of humor that he used well in his attempts to get across Torah views.

The Jewish Hospital in Berlin has suspended all religious circumcisions of children following a ruling delivered by a German court banning the practice.

Germany has just raised the level of representation of the PA/PLO delegation in Berlin to "Diplomatic Mission" headed by an Ambassador. This was announced...

"By breaking statues one risks turning into one oneself," says a caption in Jean Cocteau's 1930 film, "The Blood of a Poet." The statement could be a postmodern take on Psalm 115, which declares that those who make idols (which have mouths but cannot speak, eyes but cannot see, ears but cannot hear, noses but cannot smell, hands but cannot feel and feet but cannot walk), "shall become like them, all that place their faith in them."

Jewish art buffs might be disappointed by channel Thirteen's new 13-part series, Art Through Time: A Global View. It takes two entire episodes (one half an hour each) and part of the third episode for a reference to Jewish art to surface. This comes in the person of Shimon Attie (born in Los Angeles, 1957), whose The Writing on the Wall (1991-3) projected pre-Holocaust photographs onto the walls of buildings in the Jewish quarter of Berlin, the Scheunenviertel. Attie's projections, which were effectively before-and-after photos of particular buildings, are particularly haunting because they reveal how much the neighborhood has changed. Another work of Attie's that is discussed in the episode is Portrait of Exile (1995), which involved submerging light boxes with portraits of Danish refugees (who fled to Sweden during the Holocaust) in a canal in Copenhagen.

The term "Renaissance man" is used to describe a person who excels in a wide variety of subjects or fields. Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach's biography of his father, Rav Dr. Yoseph (Joseph) Tzvi Carlebach (1883-1942), provides fascinating information about the life of a man who deserves to be described as a Renaissance rabbi.

Since the end of the Shoah there has been a debate of what to do with the various death camps in Poland. Today more then 60 years after the end of the Holocaust the debate continues.

Publishers of this book (made into a movie of the same title currently in select theaters) hope that reviewers won't reveal the story's ending.

Albert Einstein's letter on God, in which he described the Bible as "pretty childish," sold not long ago for more than $400,000.

Those of us who grew up when television was considered kosher in its black and white days remember "The Stratton Story," a 1949 movie that aired often on TV in the '50s starring Jimmy Stewart as Chicago White Sox pitcher Monty Stratton, who lost a leg in an off-season hunting accident in 1938 near his Greenville, Texas home.

It's always a revelation when a world-renowned intellectual attacks religion as silly and juvenile only for us to discover that his or her own personal life might have greatly benefited from a commitment to the biblical values that they so casually dismiss.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a number of rabbis did their utmost to establish and maintain Orthodox Judaism in America.

When Mark Godfrey first stumbled across Peter Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered European Jews in Berlin, he did not recognize it.

Rabbi Pinchas M. Teitz, who eventually became rav of Elizabeth, New Jersey, visited America from 1933-1935.

Book collectors are often pack-rats that are obsessed with the printed word in all of its manifestations.

The best movies, as all good works of art, pepper us with insistent questions.

Imagine what it would feel like to discover, as an adult, that your own mother was a cold-blooded concentration-camp guard who participated even in the killing of babies in their mothers' arms?

Exile is punishment; exile is a constant reminder of our fallen status; exile fills us with longings for a permanent home we cannot possess.