Special to The Jewish Standard

Israel is famously known as a land of milk and honey, but it is hardly one that is flowing with water. For Israeli scientists today, maximizing water use is a key focus for research and innovation.

It may also be key to avoiding the regional war everyone says must happen some day — a war for water.

For the scientists, though, the main goal is finding ways to grow plentiful amounts of food in arid lands.

In the midst of harsh desert conditions in the Negev and the Arava, Israel’s long, eastern valley, Israeli researchers and farmers have created a flourishing network of high-tech agriculture. Tomatoes, peppers, olives, cheeses, and grapes blossom from arid land despite the fact that annual rainfall totals are measured in mere inches and the proximity to the Dead Sea produces groundwater that is highly saline.

Special to The Jewish Standard

A university president is not often expected to be an expert on military security. For Rivka Carmi, president of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, however, protecting close to 20,000 students on the school’s main Beersheva campus from rocket attacks has become a top priority.

“For many years, we presented ourselves as the safest place in Israel,” says Carmi. “Most wars were in the north. Operation Cast Lead changed all that. Now we are a real front.”

At a meeting this past spring with journalists from the United States, issues of security were front and center, as a barrage of over 100 rockets fired from nearby Gaza in retaliation for the killing of a terrorist leader caused the administration to cancel all classes and exams. Iron Dome, Israel’s mobile air defense system designed to intercept and destroy short-range rockets and shells, demolished most of the rockets.

On April 16, Greenleaf Compassion Center in Montclair was issued a permit by the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services to begin growing medicinal marijuana. A permit to dispense medicinal marijuana will be issued to Greenleaf when its dispensary is operational. That is expected to occur in about six months.

A physician’s task is to heal and to do no harm. Jewish medical oaths as well as the Hippocratic oath constantly emphasize the palliative aspect of medical care. Jewish law has codified the role of the physician, and prescribes strict standards regarding the treatment of patients.

It has been documented that marijuana is an analgesic for sufferers of nausea related to chemotherapy, appetite, and weight loss related to AIDS, migraine headaches, Alzheimer’s, muscle spasms, fibromyalgia, arthritic pain, glaucoma, and other conditions. If marijuana is superior to other drugs, and concerns raised about its continued usage, we need to analyze a number of pertinent halachic issues. We need to determine whether it is permissible to prescribe marijuana according to Jewish law.

As the number of survivors able to give direct testimony about their horrific experiences during the Shoah is dropping precipitously, the Jewish community is considering seriously how the narrative of the Holocaust may adjust to a future where no eyewitnesses remain.

According to Hillary Kessler-Godin of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, about 500,000 survivors remain alive worldwide. The Holocaust Survivors Assistance Act of 2011 estimated that about 127,000 survivors were still alive in the United States, and Paul Winkler, executive director of the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education, suggests that over the past six or seven years, the number of survivors in New Jersey has decreased from 5,000 to about 2,000.

Shira Sheps remembers walking through an exhibit at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan and stumbling upon her grandmother’s long-ago school reports alongside family photos and her great-grandparents’ wedding invitation.

Sheps, 25, had known that shortly after Kristallnacht, her grandmother, Marion Achtentuch, at age 9, had left Furth, Germany, on a Kindertransport to England. Seeing personal mementos, however, of the life that had been taken from the family, as well as her grandmother’s uncanny resemblance as a young girl to Sheps’ younger sister at that age, “I freaked out,” she says.

TRSICE, Czech Republic – Nearly 70 years after a Czech Jewish family sought refuge from the Nazis by retreating into a nearby forest and relying on non-Jewish locals for help, a New Milford High Schol teacher has helped erect a permanent monument to their memory.

Earlier this month, several dozen people went to the wooded site where the Wolf family hid to unveil a modest stone monument that commemorates their struggle to survive and the locals who helped them.

For three nightmarish years during World War II, the Wolf family survived by intermittently hiding in the woods, a friend’s shed, and people’s homes — all the while depending on others to provide them with food, fuel, and other supplies.

All politics are local. Whatever benefits us takes priority. The Talmud codifies this by putting local needs ahead of others

The Orthodox Union (OU) is supporting a scholarship bill in Trenton that will benefit other communities, but not Northern New Jersey. I support any legislation that will help ease the burden of rising day school costs, but I am committed to my community first. There is and has been a vehicle available to us which we should utilize, namely tuition tax credits.

Beginning with this issue, The Jewish Standard begins a weekly column on issues of Jewish education in our area. It is written by noted educator Dr. Wallace Greene. In this first column, he explains why we believe this column is necessary.

There are many multi-million dollar businesses in northern New Jersey. When one considers the total amount of tuition and salaries paid, the cost of bricks and mortar, infrastructure, and other ancillary costs, the enterprise known as Jewish education is one of the biggest industries in our community. We estimate it at somewhere around $80 million a year.