Parents of students from the Raqia preschool in the Nofei Yam neighborhood in north Tel Aviv have expressed outrage that their children’s school will also serve as a synagogue on Shabbat and holidays.

According to a report by Haaretz, the Tel Aviv city council gave the Ohel Yosef Yitzhak community center association the right to use the children’s school for five years, or until the establishment of a permanent synagogue.  Land for the synagogue has already been allocated.

Parents, who say they discovered the arrangement by chance, demanded the right to voice objections and said the municipality decision should be suspended pending the response of the parents.

Specifically, the parents complained that adults should not be allowed to use a building dedicated to children and that religious activities should not be held at an educational institution.  They say one of the school’s rooms has become a storage facility for prayer items, and that the electronic toilets which are disconnected prior to Shabbat are not being reconnected for use by kids during the week.

A few weeks ago, Tel Aviv residents forced the closure of a temporary synagogue in the Merom preschool next to the YOO Towers in north Tel Aviv.

One of the off the beaten track areas in Eretz Yisrael that I enjoy taking adventurous visitors to are the southern Hevron Hills.

As we drive south from Yerushalayim, passing through the very cradle of Jewish history, with its rolling green hills along the Patriarchs and Matriarchs path or the “Road of Heroism” as it is some times called, we resist the magnetic pull to stop at Gush Etzion or Hevron and continue south, fully cognizant that more Jews walked on this path than on any other road in history.

Soon, after passing the turn off to Hevron, the rolling vineyards give way to another dimension of the Land. The rich vineyards and orchards become sparser and give way to a gradual descent into a dryer, wider expanse. We are entering the borderland of the Judean Desert.

The southern Hevron hills stand as a sentinel facing east and the desert as it rolls down towards the Dead Sea.

Here one can see the desert as far as the horizon.

It is to this land, suspended between civilization and wilderness, that young David sought refuge from a jealous King Shaul. Here he locked horns with Naval HaKarmi and met his wife to be, the wise and beautiful Avigayil.

Mosaic in the Synagogue

To think that we are gazing at the very same hills and ravines where this drama took place. The very same hills! It is a place where the Bible truly comes to life.

There is even a new Jewish pioneer town, Carmel, situated just where it was in ancient times. Talk about “the children returning to their borders!” I always find it inspiring to visit one of these villages unannounced. Invariably the residents are only too happy to answer all questions and, more often than not, invite you in for a visit. The smaller and more vulnerable the village, the more hospitable its residents. I have some favorite tiny ones that I just love to bring unsuspecting visitors to. They can not help but be affected, indeed bitten by the spirit.

View of the synagogue in Susya

We come to our destination, Susyia. Today Susyia is a thriving village that attracts students form across Eretz Yisrael to their prestigious schools Its field school is home base for those who come to study the region for a day or a month where. They take their touring very seriously.

Next to modern Susyia is the excavated ancient town of Susyia. In the centuries when Jews were banned from Roman and Byzantine Jerusalem, and from the center of the country, they were forced to cling toan existence on the fringes – like in the South Hevron hills.

Unearthed recently is an entire Jewish town dating back to the times of the Talmud. Homes, ritual baths, guard walls and towers to warn of approaching bandits, wells, burial caves, underground work shops and escape tunnels – an entire town

Perched on the upper part of the town is the synagogue. Resplendent with an intricate weave of moasiac floors depicting Jewish symbols and Hebrew dedications and blessings, it was lovingly revealed by Israeli archeologists a few years ago. To think, a robust Jewish community lived right here where we sit. They prayed and conducted their business just where we stand. For hundreds of years Jews clung to the place until the Moslem conquest and the final expulsion or forced conversions in the seventh century. And today we are back. What a country!

On Friday evening two rockets hit the Gush Etzion area, south of Jerusalem.

Residents were on their way to synagogue on Friday night, when the sirens went off.

A short time later 2 rockets hit in the Gush Etzion area. No injuries or damage were reported from those strikes.

French police reportedly arrested a 21-year-old man suspected of scrawling “death to Jews” on a synagogue near Paris.

The man is suspected of writing the message with a black marker on Nov. 7 or Nov. 8 on the entrance to the synagogue of Pantin in Seine-Saint-Denis near Paris, according to the municipality.

The radio network Europe1 reported that the man was arrested in the Paris suburb on Nov. 9 and was remanded. The 11-inch graffiti was discovered early on the previous day when a group of “young men wearing hoods” was seen near the synagogue, according to the radio station’s report.

In a separate incident from Nov. 4, seven unidentified people attacked an Orthodox Jewish man in Sacrelles near the French capital. They pelted the 55-year-old man with eggs as he was making his way to his synagogue, according to the French daily Le Parisien, then hit him on his legs after he turned around and walked away from them.

The report did not say whether the attack at Sarcelles was anti-Semitic in nature.

Last September, members of what French police described as “a dangerous Jihadist network” tossed a homemade grenade into a supermarket in Sarcelles, home to some 60,000 Jews. One man sustained minor injuries in the explosion.

In a series of exit polls conducted during Election Day, Tuesday, November 6, 2012, the Republican Jewish Coalition found that Jewish support for the President dropped from 78% in 2008 to 69%.

Matt Brooks, the executive director of the RJC said, “The results demonstrate that President Barack Obama and the Democrats saw a significant erosion of support from 2008, while Republicans continued their trend of the last several decades of making inroads in the Jewish community.”

According to the RJC, there was an increase by nearly 50% of the number of Jews choosing the Republican candidate to run this country.  The percentage of Jews voting Republican jumped from 22% to 32% nationally.  This ten-point gain is the largest leap from the Democratic party by Jews since 1972.

In a call today to members of the media, former White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer pointed out that while the percentage of young and of Blacks voting for Obama dropped by three or four percentage points, the 10 % drop amongst Jewish voters is conspicuously large.

The survey, a national sample of 1000 Jewish voters, as well as a 600-person sample of Jewish voters in Ohio and a 600-person sample of Florida Jewish voters.

“The RJC is encouraged by the gains we made in 2012 and by the continuing movement in the Jewish community toward the GOP. Despite the discouraging election results, we’re pleased by the gains we have made in the Jewish community,” said Matt Brooks.

Children should be seen and not heard. It was a maxim that I heard many times throughout my childhood and which caused me a fair amount of frustration. When, I often wondered, would I cross that invisible line and move out of the periphery to which I was assigned, into the arena of adulthood and be given the chance to express an opinion that people would listen to? Life ran its course, I became an adult, was granted the right to express my opinion and found out that very few people listen to me. Interestingly, in contrast to the past, popular psychology today has touted the need to build a child’s self-confidence so successfully that children are both seen and heard quite clearly. Despite this, I wonder how many communities would make a decision based on the perception of a child. Judaism does.

Last Shabbos the clear, strong voice of the baal korei (reader) rang through the attentive synagogue as the weekly section of the Torah was read out loud. Suddenly it came to a standstill. There was a moment of utter silence and then the sudden swish of numerous prayer shawls, the thud of footsteps and the mutter of deep voices. Peeping through the lattice that separates the women’s section from the men’s, I watched the crowd of men thicken around the table on which the open Torah scroll lay.

Apparently, there was a problem with the Torah scroll. A kosher Torah scroll is treated with great respect. For example, it is not permitted to leave it unattended; a person is required to stand in its honor and may not turn his back to it. A non-kosher Torah scroll is not awarded the same level of respect. If even one letter of a Torah scroll is problematic, the entire scroll is invalidated until the problem is fixed. Most authorities maintain that a non-kosher scroll cannot be used to read the weekly portion. Since the reading must take place from a written text, reading from a non-kosher scroll is akin to reciting by heart making the reading invalid and the blessings recited over it said in vain and the Torah reading must be repeated.

Taking the above into account, every Torah scroll that is written is scrutinized for accuracy. Today, computers help out. A megiah (checker) scans the scroll into a computer running a program that checks the letters and their sequence. The computer then points out possible problems: sometimes a letter hasn’t been written correctly. Some Hebrew letters are very similar: yud, vav and nun sofit are all shaped similarly to a number one, but vary in length. Other letters are written by combining one or more two letters: for example, an aleph, which looks something like an X, is actually made up of three letters: a slanted vav, and two yuds, one above the vav and one below. Sometimes a letter is actually missing and the computer picks this up too. The scroll is then checked by the megiah himself. It seems very unlikely that any problem with the letters could creep in after all that, but, sometimes the computer and the megiah do miss problems and sometimes the problems develop later. The ink used to write a Torah scroll is usually a mixture of tannic acid, which is derived from gallnuts formed on the leaves of oak trees by wasps, copper sulphate to give it a strong black color, and gum arabic to make the glue slightly elastic so that the ink doesn’t crack when the scroll is rolled. Sometimes the letters can become smudged or cracked—after all, the scroll is being used regularly.

In this case, my son informed me, one of the congregants, a Torah scholar of standing, had spotted a letter vav that he claimed was too long—so long that it could be mistaken for a nun. That being the case, the reading was suspended while the men debated whether the letter really did pose a problem or not. In a synagogue in which number of Torah scholars rivals the number of stars in the sky on a moonless night, there was no lack of differing opinions. I watched fascinated as varying opinions of men who spent their days and night toiling in the sea of Torah were whispered urgently. Finally, the decision was made: since the mistake was debatable, a child would be asked to identify the questionable letter.

The picturesque Nachlaot neighbourhood in Jerusalem started out as what we might call today ‘social housing’. From 1875 onwards benefactors such as Moses Montefiore began building new neighbourhoods outside the walls of the Old City to house the growing Jewish population and relieve some of the overcrowding and squalor of the Jewish Quarter. Thus, Nachlaot is in fact a cluster of fused neighbourhoods, with each one originally having a specific ethnic character and its own synagogue.

After the War of Independence the neighbourhood absorbed many refugees expelled by the Jordanians from the Old City, as well as new immigrants from North Africa, and over-crowding and poverty became rife. Those who could moved out to the city’s newer neighbourhoods. A major renovation project in the 1990s updated Nachlaot with facilities such as modern plumbing and today the neighbourhood’s narrow lanes, archways and hidden courtyards lend it a charm which has made it popular once again.

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Norwegian police have increased security around Oslo’s main synagogue after an Islamist extremist threatened to “protect” the Jewish community with an “AK-47 assault rifle and a hunting permit.”

Police on Oct. 27 recommended indicting Ubaydullah Hussain, the 27-year-old leader of the radical Islamic organization Profetens Ummah. He was arrested last week after Norwegian media reported on a comment that appeared on his Facebook account:  “I will give them protection … as soon as I have received a hunting license and get hold of an AK47.”

Hussain, a former soccer referee who was born and raised in Norway, also lamented the absence of fatalities in a 2006 shooting outside the synagogue. Hussain, who participated in recent protests outside the U.S. embassy in Norway in connection with the film “The Innocence of Muslims,” later told Norwegian television he “could not confirm or deny” that his statements were a threat.

The comment was made in reaction to an interview with Ervin Kohn, head of Norway’s Jewish community, which recently appeared in the daily VG newspaper. Kohn said police were not providing protection outside the synagogue on Oslo’s Hanshaugen Street during services and were not proactive enough in their approach.

“We felt like we had been neglected, and this made us uneasy in light of what happened in Toulouse and in Malmo,” Kohn told JTA

In March, Mohammed Merah, a radical Islamist, killed three children and a rabbi in a Jewish school in the French city of Toulouse. Last month, an explosive charge was detonated outside the only synagogue in the Swedish city of Malmo.

Kohn said that since last week, there has been police protection outside the main synagogue of Oslo, the capital city, which is home to most members of Norway’s Jewish community of approximately 700.