Eight centuries after Moses led the Children of Israel from Egypt, a Jewish community thrived on Elephantine Island, a small isle on the Nile in Southern Egypt near the present-day Aswan. Archaeologists date the origin of the Elephantine community to the dispersion and exile of the Jews from ancient Israel following the destruction of the…
From the Canadian Jewish News, 2017 From the moment in 1961 that he stepped into the role, Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut was always much more than rabbi of the esteemed historic Reform congregation, Holy Blossom Temple of Toronto. It was entirely Toronto’s gain and St. Paul Minnesota’s loss when Holy Blossom enticed Rabbi Plaut here,…
From Canadian Jewish News, 2002 Below the southwestern corner of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, near the archaeological feature known as Robinson’s Arch, lies a random assortment of massive stone building blocks. Though you might not realize it at first, these blocks help bring history to life. They were once part of a parapet wall along the…
Rabbi Sherwin Wine of Birmingham Temple, Detroit, asserts that all of the patriarchs and prophets of ancient Israel are only myths — and so is the God of the Jewish people. Heretical utterances for a rabbi? Certainly, in any previous age. But today Rabbi Wine is the founder of a secular humanistic arm of Judaism…
The Biblical account of the creation of the universe is in “complete and remarkable agreement” with the latest findings of modern cosmology, notes a leading Israeli physicist who has written a book on the subject. “At least regarding the first chapter of Genesis, the era of contradiction between Torah and science is over,” says Professor…
The Talmud says that the town of Zippori, in the Lower Galilee northwest of Nazareth, was so named “because it is perched on the top of a mountain like a bird [zippor].” Also perched on this picturesque mountain, roughly 1,800 years ago, was the Sanhedrin, the grand rabbinic-judicial council of ancient Israel, whose head, Rabbi…
“A staff shall grow out of the trunk of Jesse, and an offshoot shall flourish from its roots.” — Isaiah 11:1. Multitudes of biblical and Talmudic-era plants grow at Neot Kedumim, a 625-acre nature reserve that was once so barren that its founder had to cart up topsoil from the valleys to cover the rocks…
Fifty years after the Dead Sea Scrolls first came to light, biblical scholars around the world are preparing for a major conference on the scrolls that is set to roll — or unroll, as the case may be — July 20 to 25 (1997) at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. While the scrolls have been…
We were driving southward through Israel’s Shephelah region when our guide pulled the van over to the shoulder and drew our attention to a ridge of hills to the right of us and a roughly parallel ridge to the left. We were south of Beit Shemesh on the road to Beit Guvrin, near the Ha-Ela…
A windowless, doorless chamber, set high up into the wall of an antiquated synagogue and accessible only by ladder, is not normally the sort of place to which a traveller dreams of arriving. However, it was precisely such a room that Solomon Schechter, a Cambridge professor of Talmudic literature, was determined to reach when he…
