This week the Jewish people, specifically the religious ones, mark the date of “the ninth of Av” – when according to Jewish tradition the second temple (and presumably also the first one) was destroyed, and many were killed. There are many similarities between the disasters of “the ninth of Av”, about 2,000 years ago, and […]

By Ido Sokolovsky (Original article in Hebrew here) Basically, there are two types of religious people in our world. There are those who draw the line between their world of values and the real world, still there are those who don’t. In Israel, the most prominent representative of the first kind was the late Prof. […]

“Blessed be he who has not made me a woman… Blessed be he who has not made me a gentile…” – This is part of the Morning Prayer, spoken regularly by religious Jewish men. Doesn’t sound good, right? There are tons of explanations and excuses for this “enlightened” text. Some say it’s actually meant to […]

Wine – especially red wine – is one of my hobbies. There’s something special about this red liquid with its unique aroma. Spending some time in a winery is also a unique experience. Nowhere else you can breathe the air and enjoy something like that. The so-called “western” religions of the world possess special attitudes […]

It’s the little things that piss you off. The government may use your tax money to finance anti-education, to pump huge money into close associates’ bank accounts, even to spend it on luxury trips abroad. But you’re used to all that. It’s the little things that can really annoy. One of them being the Ministry […]

The ultra-Orthodox members of any religion – Judaism in particular – find themselves in a new kind of problem. Building walls between themselves and the outside world has always been a good strategy for nourishing religious contents, as silly as they may be. Alas, here comes the end of the 20th century with television, cellular […]

“Even if we are all wise men, all understanding people, and we all know the Torah — we have been given a mitzva (religious commandment) to tell about the redemption from Egypt.” The above is a well-known passage from the ‘Hagadda of Pesach’ – the traditional text read and spoken by millions of Jews every […]

Last Saturday, while walking in some known Israeli town, I couldn’t help noticing the renowned pattern of an El Al plane passing above in the sky. An El Al airplane? On Saturday? For a moment I thought the Messiah was already here, and then I remembered the old airline trick of “On Tuesday my name […]

About six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. The ‘Shoa’ – as it is called in Hebrew – is a true terrible historical event which we all know. Many of the survivors still live among us, some carry on their skin the mark of the death camps. There is plenty of documentation in the […]

Jerusalemites suffered two disasters during the recent few days. In one of them, a building exploded due to a gas leak. A whole family – a father, a mother and a little baby – were killed. The other disaster involved a poorly-carried-out extermination of pests, which also resulted in the poisoning of two little baby […]