As a child, I was enchanted by my grandmother’s loveliness, her black hair, sapphire eyes and milky white skin. No makeup for her. I remember her only vanity: dyed eyelashes and a manicure to cover the nicotine stains on her fingers. “A lady should look like a lady,” she said. But her goodness and her no-nonsense demeanor were the most real things about her. She brushed away her beauty like crumbs.

There’s a phrase that’s popped up in recent years -- “Let go and let God”. Perhaps it is this decade’s version of the oft-quoted Serenity Prayer asking for the wisdom to differentiate between the things we can change and those we cannot. Given the recent “Aha” moments in my life, these two phrases have begun to resonate in a new way, inspiring me to add a third -- “God in His infinite wisdom.”

Shaindy Miller (nee Ehrenwald) never met three of her sisters. In 1918 in a village near Novozamsky, Hungary they were murdered by anti-Semites who played a drowning game to amuse themselves...She was born in 1930 in Galanta, Czechoslovakia. The town was on the Czech/Hungarian border and numbered about 5,000 inhabitants...

You may have read "A Doctor's Dilemma" which was posted here earlier this week. This article can be read as being supportive of not administering medically prescribed vaccinations to children. The OU has a sterling record of advocating sound physical and mental health practices and therefore advocates that all individuals, especially halachically observant Jews, abide by standard medical procedures including vaccinations. For that reason, I have ordered that the article be removed from our website. We will be posting an article supporting vaccinations in the near future.

With more than 90% of its Jewish population killed during the Holocaust, Greece has many places that can remind one of Poland. The city of Verroia, a little known place not far away from Thessalonica, even has its own "shtetl", sans the Jews, today home of a gypsy community. Thessalonica itself, home of a...

“We’re at Nezer Hazani,” the woman sitting next to me called into her cell-phone. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours.” Obviously someone was arguing with her at the other end. “I said we’re in Nezer Hazani”, she insisted. I tapped her on the shoulder. “We’re not at Nezer Hazani,” I whispered...

Twice a week I have the privilege of meeting with two charming, intelligent, young Israeli females in my kitchen. The purpose of our...

Popular among Hasidic Jews (and those with more Hasidic customs), the boy gets his first haircut at three years old. Colloquially called the 'upsherin' in Yiddish (lit. to shear off), with this haircut comes a Kippa and Tzitzit, and the child's formal introduction to Torah education and mitzvot. At some upsherin ceremonies each of those attending snip off a lock of hair, at others...