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Nov 25, 2024 | 
atlantajewishtimes.com | Richard Baroff
Israel and Lebanon have a very long relationship with intertwined fates. This has been true for thousands of years. The land of Canaan refers to what would become Lebanon as well as Israel. Their languages were very similar, their two alphabets almost identical. Both the Phoenician alphabet and the old Hebrew alphabet (which was replaced in ancient times) developed from an older Canaanite Semitic script.
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Oct 6, 2024 | 
atlantajewishtimes.com | Richard Baroff |Anat Sultan-Dadon |Michael Morris |Dave Schechter
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Oct 6, 2024 | atlantajewishtimes.com | Richard Baroff |Anat Sultan-Dadon |Michael Morris |Dave Schechter
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Sep 25, 2024 | 
atlantajewishtimes.com | Richard Baroff |Sasha Heller
Franz Rosenzweig is not as well-known as he should be among contemporary Jews. He was a thinker of extraordinary depth who left behind a very impressive body of work, especially considering his untimely death in his early 40s in 1929. Rosenzweig died of ALS-Lou Gehrig’s disease — a slow wasting away of one’s physical abilities to walk, write, and in severe cases, speak and, eventually, breathe.
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Jul 31, 2024 | 
atlantajewishtimes.com | Richard Baroff |Sasha Heller
Like many terms in Judaism, the word “yeshivah” resonates with many related meanings. Literally, yeshivah refers to “the act of sitting,” which for Jews means the act of studying — sort of like for Zen Buddhists the act of sitting (Zazen) means meditating. What else would Jews do, especially in the Ashkenazic world, when they get together but study Torah? And by Torah what is meant is not just the Written Torah (the Five Books of Moses), but the Oral Torah (primarily the Talmud).
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Jun 12, 2024 | 
atlantajewishtimes.com | Richard Baroff |Sasha Heller
When we consider Judaism, few of us would think of iconography. We are, as the philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, a people who prefer to build our monuments not physically, but in time, as exemplified in the Jewish Sabbath. Our G-d is incorporeal. In fact, in the Second Temple there was nothing at the structure’s center but an empty room, to underscore our veneration of our purely spiritual Creator– the universe’s sovereign has no form and is invisible.
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Apr 17, 2024 | 
atlantajewishtimes.com | Richard Baroff |Sasha Heller
April 9, 2024, marks the beginning of the Hebrew month of Nisan. Nisan corresponds to the more ancient month of Aviv — the month of Spring. The Torah speaks of this month as the first of the months, which would make Rosh Hashanah the seventh month a sort of Sabbatical month, more holy than the others as it is set apart for spiritual matters just as the seventh day is set aside from the other six days of the week.
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Feb 14, 2024 | 
atlantajewishtimes.com | Richard Baroff |Sasha Heller
If you have a Jewish calendar, you might notice that on Feb. 23, we commemorate Purim Katan. You might wonder what this is, and how it is different from the regular Purim. Purim Katan literally means “Little Purim” in the sense of a minor version of the holiday, or perhaps a “shadow Purim.” This shadow Purim takes place on 14 Adar this year. Most years regular Purim is celebrated on 14 Adar.
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Dec 13, 2023 | 
atlantajewishtimes.com | Richard Baroff |Sasha Heller
The term pogrom as an act of organized violence, usually against Jews, bringing death and destruction to them where they live, was a Yiddish word first used about 1890. This was largely after the first surge of the anti-Jewish riots taking place in the Czarist Russian imperial state, but certainly not the last. The word pogrom was taken from the Russian word for destruction, related to the Russian word grom for thunder.
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Apr 13, 2023 | 
atlantajewishtimes.com | Richard Baroff |Sasha Heller
Lag BaOmer occurs this year beginning the evening of Monday, May 8 and continuing through Tuesday May 9—Iyar 18 in the Hebrew calendar. In Israel, many Ultra-Orthodox three-year-old boys receive their first haircuts on this day. Many traditional Jews will visit Meron, in northern Israel, where the great second century sage and mystic, Shimon Bar Yohai, is buried. Bar Yohai died on Lag BaOmer, and so the pilgrimage to his tomb is on this day.
