Features

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.

Andrew Waxman, a banking and risk management consultant, has written what amounts to a field guide to the varieties of being and praying Jewish in New York City. For My Year in New York Synagogues, he spent his Friday evenings and Shabbat mornings in 2025 visiting nearly every synagogue within walking distance of his home on the Upper West Side.

Prayer notes placed between the stones of the Western Wall in Jerusalem over the past six months have been removed and taken for burial, as is customary every year ahead of the Jewish High Holidays.

In 2023, for its 110th Anniversary Magazine, the IJN paired teen interviewers with Holocaust survivors for “Holocaust Across the Generations.” Ami Gelman, then in 9th grade at Denver Academy of Torah, interviewed Cantor Zachary Kutner, who passed away this week.

It was 1943 in Nazi-occupied Holland, and a Jewish baby boy, Efraim Kochba (born Ernst Bernard van Coevorden), had been entrusted to Jacqueline Meents-Lenstra, a Dutch Christian woman, and her Jewish husband by a Jewish couple who were neighbors and later perished in the Holocaust.

Jewish and Israeli-owned restaurants in New York City appear to have a new off-menu offering: introducing Jewish singles to one another. “I feel like going to a restaurant — whether kosher, Jewish- or Israeli-owned — I’m more likely to meet someone who is pro-Israel,” Skye Ostreicher, 35, said.

Behind the imposing stone walls of Eastern State Penitentiary — the Philadelphia prison that once held Al Capone — sits a small, unlikely  synagogue built by inmates, for inmates, nearly a century ago. Now, a new exhibition is telling its story. Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia’s Fairmount neighborhood, was active from its founding in 1829 until its closing in 1971.

When a cancer diagnosis comes it’s always a shock — and Dr. Loraine Alderman was no exception. What did surprise her, however, was that among the literature she was reading, she wasn’t finding stories about people like herself, even though she fell into the age group of women most likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer.

Raacheli Fried, a Los Angeles native and resident of East Denver, organized a “Tehillim group,” a Psalms group, 11 years ago. People in the group recite Psalms for many reasons, among them a “complete healing,” a refuah shelemah, for sick people. A Tehillim group may also be organized to pray for a single person, as Essie Fleischmann has done.