Musings from Students of the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem
Reflections on The Marilyn and Sigi z”l Ziering Omer Program 2019/5779
Posted on June 10, 2019 by Charles (Chuck) Freedman, Ph.D. and Aviva Freedman, Ph.D.
Posted on April 8, 2019 by Jason Gusdorf
I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri in a reform Jewish household. My seminal Jewish experiences were my Bar Mitzvah and Jewish Summer camp, which I attended for 7 years. OSRUI was formative in my identity and I have a deep love for the institution, the friends I made, and the time I spent there. Continue Reading »
Posted on April 3, 2019 by Daniella Silverstein
Last week Pardes students enjoyed three days of exploring the Golan, drinking in the scenery. Rainy plains covered in wildflowers, mountains built of rocks, green for days, a shout of exaltation spilling across the landscape. We met crumbling and rebuilt temples, abandoned war bunkers, and UN personnel manning the Syrian border. And through it all Continue Reading »
Posted on April 3, 2019 by Danielle Plung
The first time I traveled to the Golan Heights was as a child, one July, on my first trip to Israel with my parents and brother. We were surrounded by brown, seemingly barren, mountains with straw-like grass, parched in the summer sun, and, when our tour guide said that this was his favorite part of Continue Reading »
Posted on March 26, 2019 by Mina Pasajlic
If anyone would have asked me if anything about my life would be different after the year at Pardes – I would have probably said something like: “Well, I’m guessing I will know a little bit more than I do now and hopefully I’ll be more confident when teaching anything Jewishly in the future”. And Continue Reading »
Posted on March 6, 2019 by Lee Lasher
It is a privilege for Cheryl and me to sponsor and dedicate today’s learning at Pardes in honor of our Children, Gabrielle and Jake Moskovitz, David Lasher and Jake Lasher. We hope and pray that our children will always know and feel how much we love them and that they should cherish the importance of Continue Reading »
Posted on March 4, 2019 by Yonatan Rahmani
The Oslo Accords presented an opportunity for the Jewish State that was never fully actualized. The generation of Israeli teens that witnessed the country split among deep rifts in 1993 and 1994 was also the generation that shed tears in 1995. This generation, I learned, is known as the Candle Generation. They witnessed the First Continue Reading »
Posted on February 27, 2019 by Shoshana Raun
It’s unusual to have your bags checked by a guard before going into an Israeli garden. And the bag check was before a second guard swept a handheld metal detector around my person. I was a little surprised. I was with fellow Pardes students at the gates of the lovely Bahai Gardens in Haifa. The Continue Reading »
Posted on February 26, 2019 by Aviva Turner
Recently, I returned from an excursion to Antarctica-The White Continent. My fascination with the polar regions began during my residency training program in 1980 when one of the nurse practitioners I was working with turned out to be the granddaughter of Admiral Bryd, who is credited with being the first person to fly over the Continue Reading »
Posted on February 25, 2019 by Danielle Plung
I love living in Jerusalem, surrounded by my fellow Pardesnikim, all of whom—in addition to being generally lovely people—share my deep commitment to spending our days in the Beit Midrash, translating texts and debating over the latest tractate of Mishna or Talmud, who love to discuss the weekly Torah portion even as they munch on Continue Reading »
Posted on February 24, 2019 by Alana Dakin
120 years after Theodore Herzl stepped foot in Eretz Israel for the first time, a group of yeshiva students makes its way slowly through the countryside just outside of Zikhron Ya’akov, one of the first Zionist settlements established in the land of Israel. Our boots are heavy with mud formed after an early spring rain Continue Reading »
