Musings from Students of the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem
Posted on January 30, 2012 by The Director of Digital Media
by Ruhi Sophia Motzkin Rubenstein I had been studying at the Pardes Institute for a few months last year when I heard a presentation by Dyonna Ginsburg, then director of a small amuta called Bema’aglei Tzedek . She described the situation of the working poor, and particularly contract workers in Israel, the gap between the Continue Reading »
Posted on January 8, 2012 by David Bogomolny
Shaul Janes grew up in Elizabeth, NJ around the corner from a synagogue that his family did not attend. They were culturally Jewish, but their lives were nearly void of Judaism. As a young man, Shaul fell in love with cooking – he would think about cooking all the time – it became his creative outlet – it was all he wanted to Continue Reading »
Posted on January 8, 2012 by Derek Kwait
After getting over Hevron, the subject on everyone’s minds and lips all last week was the craziness in Beit Shemesh. I was going to write this blog post with a lot of complaints about how more people aren’t speaking out against this behavior, but since I could have attended the protest and did not, perhaps Continue Reading »
Posted on December 31, 2011 by Andrea Wiese
Over Hanukkah break from Pardes, I had the opportunity to help deliver some much needed winter thermal shirts and gloves to soldiers in the south on the border of Sinai. I went with an organization called Standing Together (http://www.stogether.org/) which buys and delivers items to soldiers in the IDF that the government can’t afford. They Continue Reading »
Posted on December 18, 2011 by The Director of Digital Media
Some members of the Pardes community are unfamiliar with Limmud International, but several students and many alumni are intimately involved with this rapidly expanding Jewish initiative. Among them is Rose Prevezer of the UK – home of the original Limmud. While her family belonged to a Modern Orthodox shul in London (United Synagogue), Rose became Continue Reading »
Posted on December 11, 2011 by Suzi
By Suzi Brozman You’ve seen her face, always smiling and earnest. You may have noticed her occasional parrot-hued head coverings. But I’ll bet you don’t know that the parrot motif is part of the clown persona she uses in an off-duty activity—Karen is a medical clown (more about that later!) She’s officially the Assistant to Continue Reading »
Posted on December 7, 2011 by Aliza B.
When you watch the news and learn that something terrible has happened, it is easy to gauge the disaster by how many people were killed. You can classify it even more by which people were affected. Were they children or elderly? Poor or rich? Humanitarians or average joes? In the back of your mind lurks Continue Reading »
Posted on November 18, 2011 by Leah Stern
Hello fellow Pardesians and world, I am thrilled to be starting my first blog post on these and those. I am so excited to be sharing my thoughts with you!! I have decided that each week, I am going to talk about a different person or people that live in Jerusalem and how they make Continue Reading »
Posted on November 16, 2011 by Nikki Fig
I recently had the pleasure of joining Rabbis for Human Rights on an olive harvest in the Shomron Valley. I didn’t attend the trip to make a political statement, but simply saw my presence as an opportunity to help a farmer make an honest living. Anyone who knows me knows that rustling through olive trees Continue Reading »
Posted on November 11, 2011 by Derek Kwait
(X-posted from my home blog, Yinzer in Yerushalayim) This was a dark week in Israel. As it happens, the anniversaries of both Yitzhak Rabin‘s assassination and Kristallnacht fall this week, and at Pardes, we had presentations on both. Tuesday, during Group Lecture, two of our rabbis discussed the impact the assassination had on them. Rabin’s Continue Reading »
