Special to the IJN

I have published three books about rabbis who were the Torah leaders in our generation, yet I always hesitated to write about the local Torah leader in Denver, a giant of our generation, the late Rabbi Israel Kagan.

Protagonists of the Iberian age included scholars, translators, mapmakers, instrument makers and pilots. Among them, one figure deserves particular remembrance near Columbus Day: Abraham Zacuto, a Jewish astronomer born in Salamanca around 1452.

This Cursed Beautiful Land: A Russian-American Story is Evan Gershkovich’s memoir of his arrest, 16 months behind bars and release from a Russian prison.

When Tzvike and Hadas Ophir planted their vineyard in 1986, on the day their eldest daughter Adva was born, they had no plans to make wine. They wanted to grow something alongside their bee hives. The couple was among the first residents of Alon HaGalil, a town in Israel’s North about an hour-and-a-half drive from Tel Aviv. Tzvike grew up in Emek Hefer and Hadas in Kfar Yehoshua, both in farming families. Tzvike was also a second-generation beekeeper.

The first Israeli to go to space had a problem that only a rabbi could solve.He would be flying around the earth so fast that he’d see a sunrise every 90 minutes. But Shabbat is supposed to start at sundown every seventh day. This might have meant that every 10 1/2 hours the Israeli would have to break out the wine and the challah and the battery-powered space candles.