A Celebration of Young Ethiopian Musicians

March 21, 2012

Avraham Terifa Avraham Terifa is in the eighth grade but he looks like he’s only nine-years-old. A tiny dynamo of a boy, he stands before an audience of several hundred at Jerusalem’s Mishkenot She’ananim concert hall and begins to play his violin. All around the room you can hear jaws start to drop as the […]

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Stranded in the Judean Desert

March 15, 2012

Admiring the view…before the sun went down I got the SMS around 3:00 PM on Friday. “Abba, I’m OK. But we’re kind of stuck on top of a mountain.” It was our 14-year-old son Aviv who was out with five students from his school, plus one of his teachers, on a “preparation hike.” The idea […]

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Canadian Cop

March 6, 2012

Toronto’s Pearson Airport The woman at the rental car agency desk at Toronto’s Pearson Airport eyed my Israeli driver’s license suspiciously. She looked at the laminated card, then up at me, then back and forth several times. “You’re going to have a problem if a policeman pulls you over,” she finally said, explaining her hesitation. […]

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Snow-tubing!

March 1, 2012

Snow-tubing in Canada…is Israel next? We were all ready for snow in Jerusalem a couple of weeks back, but there was none in the end. Now snow is back in the weather for Friday, and I’ve already seen a few flurries today. But, after a week in Toronto, where we just were for a family […]

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Gur Hasidim and Sex: Haaretz Spices it Up

February 16, 2012

The “Beis Yisroel” with his Hasidim They say that nothing sells newspapers like sex and Haaretz had a doozy last week: the second part in an expose (OK, just a spicy research study) on the sex lives of a particular group of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel – the Gur Hasidim. The article was the talk […]

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No more lying for “religious” girls

February 10, 2012

We know a girl named Liat who lied to get out of doing army service. Despite living a secular lifestyle, she told the army she was religious, which gave her an automatic exemption. She then made matters even worse: instead of signing up for national service, which most non-haredi religious girls do, she instead fled […]

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Castration Clinic

February 1, 2012

Monty: before At first glance, it looks like any other veterinarian’s office. Pictures of dogs and cats on the walls, efficient and busy animal doctors flitting around in blue cotton smocks. But the pets coming this morning to the Jerusalem Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (JSPCA) in Jerusalem’s Talpiot Industrial Zone all […]

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A Mobile MRI

January 25, 2012

The mobile MRI truck in Beer Sheva Following the unexpected clean bill of health I received from my “shocking” EMG test a few weeks ago, the search for the cause (and cure) of my sciatica continued last week as I underwent an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) test. My doctor’s suspicion is that I have a […]

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You Got Chocolate in My Wine! No, You Got Wine in My Chocolate!

January 19, 2012

Wine and chocolate at Tishbi I’m a big fan of wine tastings. And an even bigger fan of chocolate. So when I had the opportunity to visit the new Tishbi tasting center, which combines both wine and gourmet imported French chocolate, my interest was piqued. Moreover, my palette was proud of yet another Israeli innovation, […]

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Pacha Sleeping Mama

January 11, 2012

The Pachamama Alliance is a worldwide organization that aims to raise awareness of the environmental dangers facing planet Earth – from catastrophic climate change to the mass extinction of species. The Israeli arm of Pachamama has been schlepping the organization’s five-hour core “Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream” symposium around the country. Friends of ours […]

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