Dear members and friends, Spring weather at last. The calendar kept telling me it was spring, so why was I feeling so chilled, still dragging out the corduroys and sweaters every morning? And then, I looked away, only for a moment, and Shazam! Spring. More than any other season of the year, spring holds promise — the promise of renewal, rebirth and the certainty that goodness will follow even the most difficult of times. [...]
You Are Invited... ...to a Shabbat Dinner Friday, May 1, at 6 p.m., in the community room of our shul as guests of the Board of Directors Joining us at the dinner and for Shabbat services on Friday evening, May 1, and Saturday morning, May 2 is Rabbi Robert L. Wolkoff For 19 years, Rabbi Wolkoff has served as spiritual leader of Congregation B’Nai Tikvah in North Brunswick, NJ., where he helped to grow [...]
The election of officers and members at large for the year beginning July 1, 2026 to June 30, 2027 will be held in June. Click here to view the document outlining the election process. We look forward to your participation. The Board of Directors Congregation Tifereth Israel
Plan To Join Us For Shavout — The Third Festival Of "The Big Three" Dear members and friends, Shavuot begins Thursday evening, May 21. This festival is one of the so-called Big Three: Sukkot is the Harvest; Pesach is the festival of freedom, and Shavuot is the time of the giving of the Ten Commandments, or to say it another way, the time when we receive Divine Law. It is customary for people to [...]
In the gripping historical novel, The Song of the Jade Lily, Kirsty Manning weaves together little-known threads of WWII history, family secrets, the past and the present. In 1939, two young girls meet in Shanghai and form a friendship. But the realities of war prove to be too much , and they are torn apart. In 1916, the granddaughter of Romy, one of the young girls, learns about family secrets kept hidden for half [...]
Dear members and friends, I am not a rabbi. At times like this, I wish I had at hand the depth of a Rabbi’s holy insight and the eloquence of a Rabbi’s spiritual vocabulary. With those special gifts, the better to express the joy and gratitude I feel at this moment, thoughts bestowed upon me by a simple act — a keystroke on my computer. Those of you who attend Saturday morning services may [...]
The shul will observe Yizkor on Wednesday, April 8, at 6 p.m., on Zoom. Please join our service to honor those who have gone before us.
Dinah Slepovitch. Photo by Zisl Slepovitch By Jennifer A. Stern In summer 2020, when the world was in lockdown, I couldn’t stop watching a video that featured two young children — Dinah Slepovitch and Pinya Minkin — singing a Yiddish folk song about eating potatoes every day. The song felt a lot like life during COVID-19, even as it evoked what poor Eastern European Jews often ate in the past. I was enchanted. The Yiddish language was still relatively new [...]
The corridors of Limerick’s Istabraq Hall rang out with the sounds of Hebrew prayer on a recent Shabbat to celebrate the gift of four Torah scrolls, which will serve the Irish Jewish communities outside of Dublin. The scrolls, gifted by Congregation Temple Emanu-El in Haverhill, MA, have their own extensive history: three were scribed in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust, and the fourth in Israel in the 1950s. The Temple is merging with another congregation, [...]
On March 11, permanent street markers were installed in the Scheunenviertel (Barn Quarter) to mark the approximately 50 years when Yiddish was the main language there. At the end of the 19th century, many Eastern European Jews, planning to emigrate to North America, got stuck in Berlin, trying to collect enough money or get papers for their ship journey. As a result, the area, and especially the Grenadierstrafe, became a bustling Jewish street, with many [...]
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