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Is 10 days enough time to fall in love with Israel? Absolutely. Is 10 days enough time to make a sincere and meaningful connection to the land and people? It turns out that it is.
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Vilna, Lithuania. Once, this city with its narrow, twisting lanes was renowned as the Jerusalem of the North, a flourishing center of Jewish culture.
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Things really can change in 35 years. That was my reaction to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., which I visited I was in the city participating in the Religious Action Center of Reform...
Two very different events I attended, hundreds of miles apart, demonstrated the wide range of ways in which the memory of Jews and the Holocaust are commemorated in Poland.
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Before 1933, life for the Jews in Europe was filled with rich Jewish culture. Jews often lived in shtetls (small Jewish villages) or chose to assimilate into secular society. For the most part,...
Rarely does a 16-year-old Jewish girl from suburban Massachusetts get the chance to look back on her day and recognize that she helped make history. She didn’t just talk about it or write about it;...
Dr. Gary P. Zola, executive director of the American Jewish Archives (AJA), organized a trip in 2000 to Charleston, S.C., for a group of adults interested in the firsthand study of American Jewish...
A Yiddish class in Lithuania? As soon as I heard there was such a thing, I was intrigued – and soon enough, on a sunny day in July, I was crossing the courtyard of Vilnius University and taking my...
On Yom HaShoah, which falls on April 28, I will remember the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust – and I will be thinking about a little town in the northeast corner of Lithuania, and a...
In the fall of 1980, nine years before the Berlin Wall came down, I was part of the first official delegation of American Jewish journalists to visit East Germany (German Democratic Republic, or...
So many people have asked me over the years, "Why do you keep going back to Cuba? What's so special about that trip? What's so unique about that place?" Given the U.S. government’s recent...
Visiting a congregation in another country makes a visit abroad even more personal. If you’re planning on traveling abroad, what are you waiting for?
As a fall semester student in NFTY-EIE High School in Israel, I participated in a Rosh Chodesh service last month at the Kotel (Western Wall). Although no service at the Kotel is ordinary, by...
On Yom HaShoah, the anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, we remember the Jews killed in the Holocaust. On April 16, I will remember the six million. And I will remember the afternoon I spent...
“You must be joking,” I said to myself, when, shortly after we arrived in Germany, Pastorin Ursula Sieg informed me that she arranged for me to preach in a church whose pastor in those days was a...
Cafe Spindel is a quaint café in the center of Bad Segeberg, Germany that used to house a wool-processing factory. Because it was an unseasonably warm and sunny late summer day when I visited, our...
My wife Vickie and I were thrilled to learn that our German friends, Pastor Ursula Sieg and her husband Pastor Martin Pommerening, were coming to visit us in America. When we asked if there was...
Of course, Jews will never see Jesus as God or as an object of worship as Christians do. But when Jesus is the inspiration to feed the hungry, cloth the naked, and do the things I see so many...
Kol yisrael arevim zeh lazeh. This oft-quoted Talmudic teaching – “All of Israel is responsible, one to another" (Babylonian Talmud, Shavuot 39a) – never resonated so deeply for me as when I said...
When you travel abroad, do you try to incorporate Judaism into your visits to other countries? There a myriad ways to experience Jewish life, culture, and, especially, history while traveling...
