Features

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.

The Talmud, in tractate Sukkah, discusses constructing a sukkah on an elephant. The Biblical Museum of Natural History in Israel made it happen. “It’s hard to avoid talking about the elephant in the room, which is literally the elephant in the room,” said Rabbi Natan Slifkin, the museum director known as the “zoo rabbi.”

Yom Kippur break-the-fast has ballooned into a significant event in the Jewish calendar. Though menus have become more extravagant, for many Ashkenazi Jews, the heart of the meal are the classics — bagels, smoked fish, blintzes and cake.

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.