A poem that I love, and that changed my life, is “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”, by Walt Whitman, part of his famous volume, Leaves of Grass. I first read it in a plank-lined coffee shop in Berkeley, California, ages ago, mesmerized by his imagery of flood-tides and currents, forests of swaying masts, gulls circling before the […]Read More »

In Auschwitz-Birkenau there can be seen forty thousand pairs of shoes piled along a long corridor. There is a tangled mound of spectacles, a room stacked with enamel utensils, and two tons of piled hair shaved from forty thousand people(mostly women), used for mattresses and fabric. In Auschwitz-Birkenau there can be seen stacks of Zyclon-B […]Read More »

Just recently we celebrated the holiday of Shavuot, fifty days after the first day of Passover.  In Jerusalem, Shavuot is beautiful and powerful, as people across the city stay up all night to study various aspects of Torah in lectures, seminars and small study sessions, and then flood toward the Western Wall at dawn(in the […]Read More »

I was recently blessed, as an Israeli guide, to bring a synagogue group to the amazing Save A Child’s Heart program(SACH) at the Wolfson Medical Center in Holon. Here, surgeries are performed on children from developing countries who suffer from congenital and life-threatening heart defects. When we glimpsed into the program’s Intensive Care Unit(ICU), there […]Read More »

I just went on two terrific hikes in the rolling hills southwest of Jerusalem to prepare for a hiking tour I’ll soon be guiding. “But wait a minute,” a well-meaning friend of mine said. “That’s a lot of extra work you did for that one hike. You sure it’s worth your while?” Worth my while? […]Read More »