The tombstone of a Polish woman who saved a Jewish woman by hiding her in the roof of her barn for two years during the Holocaust was rededicated with a Talmudic inscription.
An Israeli yeshiva student drowned on a pilgrimage to the grave of a Chasidic rabbi in the central Ukrainian city of Uman.
Visitors to the tomb of Jewish scholar and philosopher Moses Maimonides have been left in the dark. That\’s because the rabbis who manage the site in the Israeli city of Tiberias neglected to pay the electric bills over a long period of time.
A group of Islamists have threatened to destroy the tomb of Queen Esther in western Iran if Israel damages the al-Aksa mosque in Jerusalem. The Islamists, members of the student Islamist militia at Bu-Ali-Sina university of Hamedan, were identified by the Iranian Mehr news agency, according to the French news agency AFP. They demonstrated Sunday at the tomb. \”Muslims beware that they have started the destruction of Al-Aksa mosque while their second sacred site in Iran, the Esther and Mordecai tomb, is at peace and no Muslims make a sound,\” the protesters said in a statement.
Ruthlessly lavish in his lifetime and a villain of Jewish and Christian narratives alike, the biblical King Herod has captured the world\’s imagination anew with the discovery of his tomb outside Jerusalem.
Details of Rabbi Shalom Emmanuel Muyal\’s mission and death in the Amazon remain obscure, but that\’s nothing compared to the mystery of his afterlife.
Israel\’s Maariv newspaper reports that authorities have collected around 400 pairs of knickers and bras from the grilles of the tomb\’s window and on nearby trees.
Once we declared here that we would visit Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, we expected people to say, \”How quaint! How interesting! What an unusual place to visit.\” Instead, we invariably heard, \”Why Bratislava?\” And in Prague, when we announced our next stop, the reaction was, \”Why do you want to go there?\” Amazingly, even in beautiful Bratislava itself, residents asked in wonder and bemusement, with no hint of being impolite: \”Why would you want to come here?\”
Folks in Bratislava are not used to tourists. It is not, as they say in the travel trade, a \”destination.\” No tourist buses crowd the streets like in Prague. No Israelis swarm here. And even if tourists come, we were told, they are ultra-Orthodox Jewish tourists visiting Budapest who take a taxi to Bratislava for a quick visit to the tomb of the revered early 19th century sage Rabbi Moshe Sofer (the Chatam Sofer), and then scoot back to Budapest without so much as a backward glance.
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