As we move out of the High Holiday season, we move into another series of holidays that is at once both cyclical and linear. At the beginning of the New Jewish Year we celebrate Sukkot, thereby completing the third in a series of pilgrimage festivals. Sukkot marks the final harvest before the onset of winter…. More ▸
The Torah is filled with hundreds of commandments — 613 to be precise. But the very first commandment, to be fruitful and multiply, is arguably the most important. For without this basic and primordial act, which we read in Genesis on Simchat Torah and on the following Shabbat as we begin anew the annual cycle… More ▸
PHILADELPHIA, Oct. 2 (JTA) — The Torah is filled with hundreds of commandments — 613 to be precise. But the very first commandment, to be fruitful and multiply, is arguably the most important. For without this basic and primordial act, which we read in Genesis on Simchat Torah and on the following Shabbat as we… More ▸
For the first time in 15 years, there were no Simchat Torah celebrations here. The celebrations were but one of the casualties of the three days of violence that erupted late last month in the West Bank and Gaza Strip after Israel opened a new entrance to a tunnel located near the Temple Mount. On… More ▸
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and all the creatures within them. Before long, some of those inhabitants wrote down the way they understood their beginnings, and soon other people were explaining what the stories really meant. Biblical interpretation was born, and it was good. People have been analyzing the meanings… More ▸
The fact that Israelis celebrated both Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah on Monday left many Jewishly observant tourists here in limbo. While Israelis wound up the holiday season at sundown Monday, it was still “yom tov” Tuesday for tens of thousands of visiting Jews from abroad. According to most Orthodox rabbis, Diaspora Jews on a… More ▸
He remembered their eyes — on Simchat Torah, at the Choral Synagogue on Archipova Street in Moscow, a quarter of a century ago. Elie Weisel had been seared by that experience. I was determined to look into those eyes myself, and, on Saturday night, October 16, 1976, on the beginning of the Jewish festival of… More ▸
Question: Is the holiday of Simchat Torah (Rejoicing with the Torah) observed in the wrong season? The holy day, which came into being as a holiday in the 11th-12th century C.E., celebrates the Torah (Five Books of Moses) and, by implication, the broader Torah (the total body of instruction which makes up the Jewish tradition)…. More ▸
On Simchat Torah, Jews owned Arkhipova Street outside Moscow’s Choral Synagogue, but many in the closely pressed throng of more than 10,000 were ready to sell it for an exit visa to the United States. They came to the synagogue last Saturday night to affirm their identity as Jews, although few inside held siddurim and… More ▸
A Tunisian policeman fatally shot four Jews, one of them a four-year-old boy, and wounded eight others yesterday when he opened fire on worshippers attending Simchat Torah services at the El Ghirba synagogue on Jerba island just off the Tunisian coast. He then shot to death a Tunisian truck driver before he was apprehended by… More ▸
