Jewish National Fund offers suggestions for Passover, with items available through its Web site.

The “Moriah Haggadah,” illustrated by Israeli artist Avner Moriah, tells the Passover story with traditional songs and colorful images. Water Cards for Passover or other occasions benefits JNF’s water resource projects in Israel. Osem Products for Passover supports Israel and JNF at the same time: For each purchase of Osem’s five pound matzoh the company will make a donation to JNF to plant a tree in Israel.

JNF has partnered with Tzora Vineyards and importer Israeli Wine Direct. Tzora will donate $1 from every bottle of 2006 Tzora Neve Ilan and 2006 Tzora Shoresh sold in the U.S. for JNF projects that help the people of Sderot. Through Passover, ground shipping is included when you order six bottles or more of Tzora Shoresh.

To order, visit www.jnf.org.

The Jewish Center of Teaneck offers pre-Passover Shabbat meals on the weekend prior to the holiday. There will be a dinner on March 26 at 8:15 p.m. and a lunch on March 27 at 12:45 p.m., at the shul.

It costs $18 per person per meal for adult members and $12 for children under 12, with a $70 family maximum. Non-members pay $21 per person and $15 for children, per meal, with a family cap of $100.

Reservations and payment are due Tuesday, March 23. For information, call (201) 833-0515 or www.jcot.org.

The Paramus Networking Group, for those in career transition and/or looking to expand networking opportunities, meets at the Jewish Community Center of Paramus on Wednesday, March 24, at 6:30 p.m. Dale Kramer of Lee Hecht Harrison, an outplacement firm, will discuss “How to Network Successfully.” The event is free and all are welcome. For information, call Joe Herrmann, executive director, at (201) 262-7691.

NEW YORK – The last time the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance organized a conference at Columbia University, in 2007, Israeli activist Tova Hartman electrified a crowd of several hundred with her call to “stop kvetching” and start acting until the plight of “chained women,” or agunot, was resolved.

“Let this be the last JOFA conference where we need to ask if there’s a halachic heter [permissive legal ruling] for agunot,” Hartman said of women seeking divorces from husbands refusing them a religious writ of divorce, or get.

The audience roared its approval.

Three years later, Hartman has her wish. Agunot activists are no longer asking if methods consistent with Jewish law exist to help such women; they know that they do.

Jeanette Friedman and Philip Sieradski were honored by the Teaneck school board and the Department of New Jersey War Veterans last Wednesday at a board of education meeting at Teaneck High School. The New Milford couple were thanked for donating more than 250 books and DVDs, as well as artwork by Otto David Sherman, to the Teaneck High School Holocaust and Genocide Studies Center. The president of the School Board, Henry Pruitt, presented each of them with a Teaneck Apple pin.

The Friedman-Sieradski Holocaust and Genocide Studies Library, created in honor of their parents, Peska and Wolvie Friedman and Daniel and Regina Sieradski, all Holocaust survivors, came from their personal collection.

WASHINGTON – Last summer, when the relationship between the Obama and Netanyahu administrations was getting off to what appeared to be a rocky start, Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren was at pains — twice — to deny that he had been “summoned” to the State Department for a dressing down.

One such “meeting” was actually a friendly phone call, he said, and the other was a routine getting-to-know-you meeting. The distinction was key, he told journalists: When the State Department actually “summons” an envoy, “that’s serious.”

Welcome to the serious zone: Oren’s spokesman, Jonathan Peled, confirmed to JTA that the ambassador indeed had been “summoned” for a meeting last Friday with James Steinberg, the deputy secretary of state. The summons came as the controversy engendered by Israel’s announcement of new construction in eastern Jerusalem during last week’s visit by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden showed no sign of abating.

In response to the Obama administration’s stepped-up criticism of Israeli building plans in Jerusalem, Jewish groups are slamming the White House for failing to speak out more against Palestinian incitement.

Particularly galling, several Jewish organizational leaders said, is that the administration has ratcheted up its criticism of Israel while failing to utter a word about the decision of the Palestinian Authority to go through with plans to name a public square in Ramallah after Dalal Mughrabi, a terrorist who led a 1978 bus hijacking in which 37 Israelis, including 12 children, were killed.

JERUSALEM – For Sindy Benavides, a Hispanic community organizer from Virginia who was visiting Israel last week, the Jewish community is a newfound friend.

Three years ago, Benavides said, she had the “frightening” experience of seeing the number of anti-immigration bills introduced in the Virginia House of Representatives triple to 148 — a reaction, she said, to the influx of Latino immigrants in the area.

With funding and training from the American Jewish Committee, Benavides and her fellow Latino community members mobilized to defeat about 100 of the bills in the 2006-07 legislative session — all those whose passage ran counter to the interests of their community.