Each of the 12 tribes of Israel received a specific piece of the Promised Land.
Today, Jews returning to Israel may live wherever they wish. Most English-speaking immigrants gravitate to such central areas as Jerusalem, Ra’anana, Beit Shemesh, and Chashmona’im.
But escalating real-estate prices in these clusters are keeping people from making the move, said Soli Yisrael Foger of Englewood, who grew up in Israel, left in 1983, and is ready to return.
His solution to that problem: Create a new “American-style” neighborhood in the more affordable Lower Galilee as a communal aliyah project.
And so it was that a team from Ma’ayanot Yeshiva High School for Girls in Teaneck took first prize in a competition to engineer a system for avoiding collisions on railroad tracks.
“I think we won because ours was the most practical — maybe not the most complex solution, but it got the job done,” said Devorah Saffern of Bergenfield, one of the eight sophomores involved in the project.
“Ours was really simple, economical, and practical, and could be applied in reality,” Chaya Levin of Teaneck added.
Asher Brenner, an eighth-grader at YBH of Passaic-Hillel, captured first place in the Hebrew middle school division of the National Bible Contest-Chidon HaTanach (Five Books of Moses, Prophets and Writings) on May 5.
He earned a perfect score.
It is the second year in a row that a YBH eighth-grader has achieved that distinction in the famously difficult competition. Yishai Eisenberg, who recently tied for first place internationally, set the bar high in 2012.
“The von Trapp children don’t play; they march!” Baron von Trapp’s butler reminds Maria, who has suggested sewing new play clothing for the children in her charge.
Many people immediately will recognize that classic line from “The Sound of Music.” However, this scene, starring students from Sinai’s Rabbi Mark & Linda Karasick Shalem High School on May 7 was unusual: The butler and Maria read their lines from cards they held in their hands. And when the von Trapp children came to Maria’s room seeking solace during a scary thunderstorm, one of the kids arrived in a wheelchair and another had Down syndrome.
The first thing you notice about David Kleid’s new electric sedan is the quiet.
Driving up the hills toward Jerusalem from his home in Ma’aleh Adumim, Kleid’s shiny blue Renault Fluence emits barely a whisper.
But the lack of noise is not what motivated the former Fair Lawn resident to lease the Fluence through Better Place, the U.S.-Israeli electric car company that aims to set up Israel as a replicable model for the rest of the world — if enough David Kleids are willing to give it a test drive.
Kleid, a physician in the pediatric intensive care unit at Hadassah University Medical Center-Ein Karem in Jerusalem, does not consider himself an “early adopter” type. The all-electric Renault appealed to him mainly for its ability to free him from the gas pump.
To celebrate our 31st wedding anniversary, Steve and I rented a car and spent two nights in Haifa and then Shabbat at nearby Kibbutz Nir Etzion.
I have written a couple of articles about Israel’s artists colony, Ein Hod, which sits right next to Nir Etzion. Ein Hod is a picturesque Carmel Mountain village housing Israelis with extraordinary talent in visual or performing arts, music, or literature. Every new resident must be approved by a jury on the basis of his or her body of work. It also houses several gallery shops, small museums, and cafés (which are not kosher).
Ticket holders were already lined up outside the Jerusalem Theater more than two hours before the start of the show. Security was tight — Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and other VIPs were on their way. TV crews were hauling in their equipment, and police had cordoned off the street.
The excitement wasn’t about a pop star, however. It was for the 50th Chidon Ha-Tanach-International Bible Contest for Jewish Youth. And when the two-and-a-half-hour competition was over, a new celebrity emerged: Yishai Eisenberg, the unassuming Passaic ninth-grader who became the first non-Israeli to take first place in the contest in 25 years.
When Rabbi Benjamin Yudin moved to Fair Lawn to lead Congregation Shomrei Torah in 1969, only 17 families belonged to the borough’s sole Orthodox synagogue.
Today, Fair Lawn has seven synagogues that follow Orthodox practice, including two Lubavitch-Chabad and a Sephardic.
Shomrei Torah has close to 300 member units. Its leadership has made a concerted effort over the past five years to recruit young families after noting that although the sanctuary was filled on Shabbat, there weren’t many baby strollers parked outside.
They asked Yeshiva University’s Center for the Jewish Future to partner in a program to offer young married YU graduates two years of rent-free living in a nearby apartment complex in return for spreading the word about Fair Lawn to their friends.
Dina Lustiger and Ilan Davidovics really, really hope you’ll vote for them in a contest to win a $10,000 grant toward making their future home in Israel.
The engaged couple is one of eight pairs of Israel-bound U.S. lovebirds taking part in the Wedding Gift Challenge (http://thisismyisrael.com/Contests/WG), an online competition sponsored by Nefesh B’Nefesh, a Paramus-based organization that facilitates aliyah from North America and Britain.
“We will be getting married this summer and hope to move to Israel a few weeks after our wedding,” Lustiger wrote to the Jewish Standard. She is from Teaneck; Davidovics is from Englewood.
Joshua Prager’s fourth-grade teacher at the Moriah School of Englewood once brought her husband to meet the class. Dina Cochin wanted to impress upon the children that although her husband was blind, disability can have positive aspects.
“When we go to bed and turn the lights off, I have to stop reading, but my husband can keep reading because he has Braille books,” Prager remembers his teacher saying.
“We all thought that was so cool. It made a big impact on me,” said Prager, an award-winning journalist whose new ebook, “Half-Life: Reflections from Jerusalem on a Broken Neck” (Byliner, $3.99), describes coming to terms with his own disability.
