Lag B’Omer will be celebrated this Thursday. The name of the holiday means “the 33rd day of the Omer,” a period that begins on the second day of Passover. Counting the Omer historically references the harvesting of the new barley crop to be brought...

This Shabbat, we will read Parashat Emor from the Book of Leviticus. Like many of the other Parshiot in this section of the Chumash, Emor highlights the special responsibilities and obligations placed upon the Kohanim, the Priestly Class of Ancient Israel. One...

God spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to the whole Israelite community and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Eternal your God, am holy.” This, to me, is the essence of our heritage. The simple beauty of these two verses declare that...

We begin with sadness in this portion. And so the maqam, the musical figure in our communities of the eastern Mediterranean  associated with this portion, is maqam hijaz. A maqam is a musical figure, a partial scale, a modal form. The word maqam is a...

This week's Torah reading contains additional details about Kashrut, our Sacred Diet. To better understand the significance of the details of Kashrut, we need to go back to the Creation story (as found in the first chapter of Genesis) which depicts God...

A tri-lingual Crown Center Senior Living Passover event on April 21 combined food, wine, and memories. The occasion was a special seder for the Jewish Russian immigrants who call Crown Center home. A joyous group of 20 residents gathered at the Circle@Crown...

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach! We find ourselves this Shabbat celebrating the eighth and final day of the Festival of Pesach, which includes the recitation of the Yizkor, the Memorial Prayers, which are chanted four times annually. And yet,...

(JTA) — A 13th-century Sephardic haggadah from Catalonia, Spain. A 15th-century haggadah from Prague. A 20th-century haggadah from Fez, Morocco. For the first time, a selection of some of the most historic haggadahs from the National Library of Israel’s...

(JTA) — Just days before Jews around the world gather with their families and friends to read the Haggadah as part the Passover holiday, one family of reunited Holocaust survivors filed a lawsuit to reclaim a 700-year-old haggadah that they say was...

Passover was on March 30 the first year I ever celebrated it. I remember it was a stormy spring in Los Angeles. Rainwater roared through the city aqueducts. I had never witnessed so much rain in Southern California before. Everything seemed to be moving...

(JTA) — Between air-raid sirens in Odessa, Svetlana Niselevitch, an 84-year-old Ukrainian-Jewish Holocaust survivor, has been preparing to join a Passover seder for the first time in her life. “We didn’t observe Jewish traditions in my family,”...

(JTA) —  When the war came, Galina Chornobyl fled so fast she left her teeth behind. That’s one of the first things she shared with me when I met Galina at the Siret border crossing in Romania late last month. Kyiv had become untenable —...