The Aleph Institute, a Chabad-Lubavitch organization catering to the needs of Jewish soldiers and their families, is helping servicemen celebrate the upcoming holiday of Shavuot with 1,000 special military edition Torah books, according to a report on Chabad.org.  The pocket-sized, soft cover, camouflaged  Gutnick Edition Lifestyle Books Torahs include Hebrew text with a contemporary translation and commentary by Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe.

The movement shipped 1,000 editions around the world, along with individually-wrapped single-serving cheesecakes, in keeping with the Shavuot tradition to eat dairy foods, as well as holiday candle-lighting kits.

The organization also announced that it will offer correspondence classes on Jewish topics such as prayer, holidays, and kosher laws.

In a press release issued on Wednesday, the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Ir David Foundation announced that a clay seal was discovered bearing the name of the city of Bethlehem, evidence that the city existed during the period of the First Temple in Jerusalem.  The find fortuitously coincides with the upcoming holiday of Shavuot, during which time Jews from around the world focus on the story of the biblical figure Ruth, set in the city of Bethlehem.

The 1.5cm seal – called a bulla – was discovered during sifting of soil removed from the archeological excavations the Israel Antiquities Authority is carrying out in the City of David, just outside the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City.  The sifting is underwritten by the Ir David Foundation, which treated The Jewish Press to a private tour.

The clay bulla was meant to seal a document or object, used as a way of showing that the private item had not been tampered with.

The new bulla bears the words:   בשבעת   Bishv’at    בת לים    Bat Lechem [למל[ך   [Lemel]ekh

Eli Shukron, director of the excavation on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, said “it seems that in the seventh year of the reign of a king (either Hezekiah, Manasseh or Josiah), a shipment was dispatched from Bethlehem to the king in Jerusalem.”

“The bulla we found belongs to the group of “fiscal” bullae – administrative bullae used to seal tax shipments remitted to the taxation system of the Kingdom of Judah in the late eighth and seventh centuries BCE,” Shukron said.  “The tax could have been paid in the form of silver or agricultural produce such as wine or wheat”.

According to Shukron, this is the first time the name Bethlehem has appeared in an inscription from the First Temple period, proving that Bethlehem was a city in the Kingdom of Judah, and possibly in earlier periods.”

The first mention of Bethlehem in the Bible occurs in regard to the matriarch Rachel, wife of Jacob, sister of Leah, and mother of Joseph, who died while giving birth to Benjamin “in Ephrat, which is Bethlehem, and was buried there (Genesis 35:19; 48:7).

In later generations, when the region was settled by the descendants of Jacob and Leah’s son Judah, a man named Boaz made Ruth, a Moabite convert and daughter-in-law of Naomi, his wife (Book of Ruth).  The couple’s great-grandson, David, became the most celebrated king in Jewish history, and made his capital in Jerusalem, on the site of the modern day “Ir David” – City of David.

Jerusalem, May 22, 2012 — As the Jewish holiday of Shavuot approaches this weekend, Nefesh B’Nefesh, which works in close cooperation with the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption and the Jewish Agency for Israel, organized a special celebration yesterday in Ein Yael, Jerusalem for new Olim to better prepare them for their first Shavuot in Israel.

At the event, the children, accompanied by their parents and Nefesh B’Nefesh staff, prepared for Shavuot by assembling delicious baskets of fruit, which is a customary tradition in Israel during this period.

“I’m so excited to be celebrating my first Shavuot in Israel,” said seven year old Nachi Jerozolim, who made Aliyah with his parents from Woodmere, NY last August. “It is so much fun to be living in a Jewish country where everyone around me is getting ready to celebrate the same holiday.”