William E. Grim Posted Sep 13 2002 I’m not Jewish. Nobody in my family died in the Holocaust. For me, anti-Semitism has always been one of those phenomena that doesn’t really register on my radar, like tribal genocide in Rwanda,…
Category: Jewish History
Room 47 – Lower Tunnels, secret tunnels underneath the “basement”
Exhibit 47a- Secret Tunnel. Below King Solomon’s Stables there are two levels of secret tunnels. No one knows why they were built. Possibly they were an emergency exit from the Bais HaMikdash. Exhibit 47b- Niche. In the right wall of…
Hanna’s War from VHS Video into DVD
One of the Holocaust videos I watched as a child really stayed with me until today. The movie, like many, was far from a best-seller (there will only be one Schindler’s List), but I believe it was immortalized in video…
The Evolution Of American Orthodoxy: An Interview with Yeshiva University Librarian Zalman Alpert
Books. Some people love them; others claim they can do without them. For Zalman Alpert, they are essentially his life. For the past 35 years, Alpert has served as a reference librarian at Yeshiva University (YU). Educated at Columbia University’s…
The Vilna Gaon’s Theorem – Fact or Urban Legend?
In the Yeshiva world some people like to attribute the Vilna Gaon’s mathematical expertise (from his publication of a Trigonometry book Ayil Meshulash) and giving him credit to Cramer’s Theorem (his grandfather’s last name was Kremer, hence the derivative). I…
Availability of Kosher Food Aboard Titanic Sheds Light on Immigration Via England
(The Dayton Jewish Observer) — Of the 2,225 people aboard Titanic on its maiden voyage, 1,512 perished in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic when the ship went down in the early hours of April 15, 1912. Charles Kennell…
Ramchal – Beards and Beardlessness in Italian Jewish History – is Rabbi Reisman Correct That “All Great Tzaddikim” Had a Full Beard?
Bottom line, Italian Rabbis and Kabbalists didn’t have beards as they felt that Mekubalim having beards was only applicable in Eretz Yisrael. The following was reprinted from Onthemainline: On pg. 416 of Rabbi Yisroel Reisman’s Pathways of the Prophets1, in the…
The Way it Was – 1841 Purim in New York
Reprinted from OnTheMainLine: These are two pieces that ran a week apart in the New York Herald (Tribune) in March of 1841. They describe Purim before, and after. The quality of them is not the greatest, so I also typed…