Ziplining with the Orthodox. Digging for Maccabean relics with archaeologists. Off-roading on the Golan. We planned our family trip to Israel on the theory that our kids would learn more if they were happy and engaged than if they were bored and bedraggled.
Chasidic Williamsburg, Roosevelt Island and Long Island City are easily navigable by bicycle, but given New York\’s frenetic pace, you might prefer an expert take you there.
It was 1974, and gas had soared to $1.29 a gallon. Tens of thousands of educated, white-collar Americans imagined that they were truckers, squawking \”breaker, breaker\” and \”10-4\” into their CB radios, adopting handles like \”Rubber Duck.\”
Every year during the High Holidays, my rabbi at Temple Beth Am makes an appeal for Israel Bonds to our congregation. However, this year, I suggested — and he agreed — that teenagers be the ones to inspire the congregation to support Israel.
Poets have been known to wax lyrical about \”the glory that was Greece.\” Yet a visitor to Greece today quickly finds that the glory\’s not only in the past tense. While those who built the shrines to Zeus and Apollo are long gone, the people who inhabit modern Greece are unquestionably alive.
As a student at Cal State Northridge more than 30 years ago, Aron Hasson wrote a paper about the Sephardic synagogues of his ancestral homeland, the Greek island of Rhodes.
The captivating simplicity of Onset, Mass., sneaks up on you. In this quaint harbor town, the main activity is perhaps taking walks to the harbor to watch the boats sail and the sun glisten on the water. Therein lies its charm, as well as a hidden jewel of a shul near the bridge at the entrance to town.
For visitors to Israel this summer, the disengagement from the Gaza Strip proved hard to ignore.
\”Everybody\’s orange,\” said Rebecca Kaminski, from Berlin, with a laugh, referring to the color adopted by the anti-disengagement activists. \”I\’m on the blue side, I guess.\”
Sitting on the beach in Netanya, the 22-year-old was working on her already impressive tan with a group of girlfriends, all students at a six-week summer ulpan, or Hebrew-language immersion course, in Kibbutz Mishmar Hasharon.
They have not been deterred from visiting Israel during its exit from the Gaza settlements and parts of the West Bank.
