During the Second Temple, the Greek empire reigned (over Israel),1 and they (the Greeks) passed decrees against the Jews and (tried) to erase their religion, and did not allow them to carry out Torah (study) or the commandments. They put their hands on their property and their daughters. They entered the Temple, destroyed and made the pure unclean. The Jews were in great distress because of them and were much oppressed, until the G-d of their fathers had mercy on them, delivering them from their hands and saving them. Then overcame, the sons of the Hasmonean High Priest, (the Greeks) and killed them and saved the Jews from their hands. They appointed a king from the Priests, and the kingdom of Israel was restored for more than 200 years until the destruction of (the) second (Temple). When the Jews overcame their enemies and destroyed them, it was the 25th of Kislev2 when they entered the Sanctuary (inner room) and did not find pure (olive) oil in the Temple, except one jar sealed with seal of the High Priest, and it did not contain enough to light except for one day only. But they lit from it the lamps of the Menorah3 for eight days, until they could crush olives and produce a (new quantity) of pure oil. For these reasons, decreed the Sages of that generation that these eight days that begin on the 25th Kislev, will be days of joy and praise. One lights on them lamps at evening at the entrance to the houses, every evening of the eight nights to show off and demonstrate the miracle. These days are called ''Hanukah'' that is to say ''they rested'' (chanu) on the ''25'' ('th of the month) because on the 25th they rested from their enemies. and also because of those days they (re)-dedicated the house (Temple) which their foes had defiled. Also some say that it is a commandment to increase slightly the festive meals on Hanukah. Another reason is because the work of (building) the Sanctuary (in the desert) was completed in these days. One should tell one's children the story of the miracles that were done for our fore-fathers in those days, (see Josephus) However, these meals are not considered as part of the commandment unless one says at the meal songs of praise. One should increase charity in these Hanukah days, for this can help mend any defects in our souls. This charity, should be given particularly to poor Torah scholars. (KSA 139:1)
1) 352 BCE until 70 CE
2) 139 BCE
3) The Menorah was made of gold and had seven branches.
It’s an exhilarating feeling we can all relate to — FedEx notifying you that your package has been delivered.
But before you mindlessly click on that text message that looks like it’s from FedEx, take a second look because it could be a scam.
Some people around the country are receiving text messages that show a supposed tracking code and link to “set delivery preferences.” The text is deceiving as it uses the recipient’s real name.
The link directs people to a fake Amazon listing and then asks them to take a customer satisfaction survey, according to HowToGeek.com. After answering a couple questions, the scam then asks for personal information and a credit card number to claim a free gift.
The Duxbury Police Department in Massachusetts warned o...
President Vladimir Putin said during a visit to Israel on Thursday that he had given assurances to the mother of Naama Issachar, an Israeli-American woman jailed in Russia on drug charges, that “everything will be okay” for her daughter.
Israel has called on Russia to release Issachar who was sentenced by a Russian court to seven and a half years in jail for drug offenses in October.
The New Jersey-born woman was arrested in April last year after police found nine grams of cannabis in her bags during a stopover at a Moscow airport.
Putin, who is in Jerusalem to mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, made the comments at a meeting with Issachar’s mother and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Read more at Algemeiner
ZAKA Chairman Yehuda Meshi-Zahav to the World Holocaust Forum: Deal with the dignity of the dead, before commemoration.
ZAKA recently received inquiries from tour guides and visitors to the extermination camps in Poland about the phenomenon of thousands of human bones floating above ground after the rain.
Jerusalem, January 23, 2020 - In coordination with government officials in Poland, a ZAKA delegation and representatives of the Committee for the Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries in Europe (CPJCE) recently visited the camps in order to assess the phenomenon. Engineers from the Polish government also participated in the delegation.
The delegation discovered many examples of human bone emerging from the ground. This phenomenon was witnessed over a wide area in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where...
Amid growing concerns about the spread of a new potentially fatal coronavirus, Chicago’s O’Hare and Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airports on Wednesday became the latest in the U.S. to begin conducting expanded screenings of travelers arriving from Wuhan, China.
More than 1,200 people have been scrutinized since U.S. health officials began screening passengers at John F. Kennedy, Los Angeles and San Francisco international airports last week. No one has been found to have the virus or been hospitalized through those screenings.
The virus has killed at least 17 people and sickened hundreds more. More than 470 people have fallen ill in China, and cases have been identified in Thailand, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea.
On Wednesday, authorities in Wuhan suspended all outboun...
Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet on Thursday with the mother of a young Israeli-American woman imprisoned in his country.
Naama Issachar, 26, was arrested at a Moscow airport last April after she was found to be in possession of a negligible amount of cannabis during a stopover on the way home to Israel from a trip to India. She was sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison for drug smuggling, a charge she denies.
It is widely believed that political reasons were behind her heavy sentence, and a campaign is underway to free her.
According to a report published on Wednesday by the Israeli news site Mako, citing a Kremlin official quoted by the Russian news site Vedomosti, Naama’s mother Yafa will join Putin and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a meeting at the Pri...
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The first day of the Senate trial of President Donald Trump on impeachment charges proved to be a modest hit on television, with an average of 11 million viewers tuning in during the afternoon hours and more than 7.5 million sticking around to watch on cable news during the evening on Tuesday.
The marathon procedural session was carried on the six leading broadcast and cable networks during the daytime. The broadcast networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) switched to regular entertainment programming in the evening, ceding the coverage to Fox News, MSNBC and CNN.
An average of 11.01 million viewers watched the proceedings between 12:30 p.m. and 5 p.m. Eastern time, across the six networks, according to Nielsen Media Research. The audience fell to an average of 7.55 million during prime-time hours (...
The new leader of Islamic State has been confirmed as Amir Mohammed Abdul Rahman al-Mawli al-Salbi, according to officials from two intelligence services. He is one of the terror group’s founding members and has led the enslavement of Iraq’s Yazidi minority and has overseen operations around the globe.
The Guardian has learned that Salbi was named leader hours after the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in October. The name that the group gave for Baghdadi’s replacement at the time, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Quraishi, was a nom de guerre not recognised by other senior leaders or intelligence agencies.
In the three months since the raid that killed Baghdadi, a fuller picture of Salbi has been pieced together by regional and western spies, placing him at the center of ISIS de...
Amazon AMZN, -0.24% has beaten Google GOOG, +0.10%, Apple AAPL, +0.36% and Microsoft MSFT, -0.48%, to become the world’s most valuable brand, according to a global report.
The value of the e-commerce giant’s brand has soared 17.5% to a record $220.8 billion - the first brand to top $200 billion - the Brand Finance Global 500 index found. Google, which comes second, also climbed in value, while third-placed Apple and fourth-placed Microsoft saw their brand values dip.
Samsung 005930, -1.61% ranked fifth on the list, while three Chinese brands - Industrial and Commercial Bank of China 1398, -0.88% , Huawei and insurer Ping An made it into the top ten, alo...
Ahead of the Fifth World Holocaust Forum this week in Jerusalem, Israel has sent Hamas a warning that it will respond immediately and with force if the terrorist organization attempts to undermine the forum, which will be attended by dozens of world leaders.
Concerned at the possibility that Hamas might seek to exploit increased international attention on Israel due to the event, Israel told the terrorist organization that it would respond with forceful strikes to any attacks, despite the international attention, Israel’s Channel 13 reported on Monday.
Hamas is believed to be responsible for the explosives-laden balloons that were launched into Israel from the Gaza Strip last week, according to the report.
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin and the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and m...
These candlesticks were rescued from a Polish shul destroyed by the Nazis in 1939, and were recently given to a Toronto shul that was built to resemble their original home.
Baltimore, MD – Jan. 22, 2020 - It is with sadness that BaltimoreJewishLife.com informs the community of the petirah of Mrs. Zillah Ezra, a"h, mother of Jared Ezra.
The levayah will take place on Thursday, Jan. 23, at 12:30 PM at Levinson’s.
Shiva will be observed at 116 Sunny Meadow Lane, Reisterstown, MD, 21236 through Wednesday morning.
Minyanim:
Shacharis: 7:00 / Sunday: 8:00 AM
Mincha: N/A
Maariv: 7:00 PM
Bila HaMaves LaNetzach...
The two police officers who detained the man accused of stabbing five people during an antisemitic attack on a Channukah party in Monsey, New York, on Dec. 28 were honored in full by Rockland County on Tuesday.
NYPD officers David Radziwon and Russell Mattera were presented with a number of awards, including the distinguished service award — the Rockland County Legislature’s highest honor.
The officers captured the assailant Grafton Thomas during a traffic stop in Harlem, shortly after police say he fled the scene of the attack.
“We didn’t know the circumstances,” Mattera said Tuesday morning after he and Radizwon were presented with their awards. “We knew of the car they were looking for.”
Federal prosecutors filed hate crimes charges against ...
President Trump on Tuesday confirmed he plans to expand his controversial travel ban that bars citizens of certain countries from entering the United States.
Trump told The Wall Street Journal in an interview on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that he is looking to add more countries, though he would not say which ones.
Multiple media outlets reported that seven countries are being considered to be covered by the travel ban, including Belarus, Burma, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Sudan and Tanzania.
Read more at The Hill.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday denied a motion to fast-track a challenge to the Affordable Care Act so that it could be considered this term.
Without comment, the justices turned down a motion by the House of Representatives and Democratic-led states to expedite review of a decision last month by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. The panel struck down the law’s mandate that individuals buy health insurance but sent back to a lower court the question of whether the rest of the statute can stand without it.
But the lower courts have kept the Affordable Care Act in place as appeals continue, and a practical effect of the Supreme Court’s action is that it will stay that way at least through the November elections. Democrats have made health care and defense ...
Russia’s chief rabbi expressed optimism on Tuesday about the potential release of a young Israeli-American woman imprisoned in his country on drug charges, saying, “I think we are finally nearing the end.”
Naama Issachar, 26, was arrested at a Moscow airport last April after she was found to be in possession of a small amount of cannabis during a stopover on the way home to Israel from a trip to India. She was sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison for drug smuggling, a charge she denies.
It is widely believed that political reasons were behind her heavy sentence, and a campaign is underway to free her.
It is hoped that Russian President Vladimir Putin will pardon Issachar during his visit to Israel this week for the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the ...
This coming Shabbos is the yahrtzeit for both of my parents. They died in different years but on the same Hebrew Date, 28 Teves. I would like to recount two intertwined stories that show how their survival, and thus our family’s existence, could easily never have happened.
My father, Meyer Oberstein, was born in 1905 and came to the United States in 1924, at the age of nineteen. He told me how he almost died. After World War I there was a war between Poland and Russia. As always, the Jews were in the middle and suffered greatly. My father lived in Tiktin, Poland.
During this fighting, there was a curfew, and no one was allowed out of their homes. To go outside was to risk your life. But there was no food in the house. As a lad of 14 or 15, he went out to sell something ...
U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Kelly Craft took Iran to task and staunchly backed Israel at a U.N. Security Council debate on the Middle East on Tuesday.
“While the world criticizes Israel, Israel is making the world a better place. The council should not lose sight of this fact,” she said, urging council members to instead focus on Iran.
“Our failure to address Iran’s central role in destabilizing the region sends a powerfully damaging message to those seeking lasting peace and prosperity in the region,” she said. This, she argued, “only encourages further instability, which puts the peace we all seek at greater risk.”
Craft called upon her U.N. colleagues to “focus on the regional actor fueling division, violence and hatred. The regime that...
The number of fatalities in the IDF fell to its lowest level ever in 2019, the army’s manpower division announced Wednesday morning, with 27 deaths recorded during the previous year.
The number of deaths among active service members last year marks a significant decrease from previous years, with 47 fatalities recorded in 2018, and 55 IDF fatalities in 2017.
Of the 27 IDF service members who died last year, two were declared dead last year as a result of terrorism or military operations, though only one was actually killed in 2019 – 19-year-old Gal Keidan, who was killed in a stabbing attack in Ariel last March. The second fatality recorded was Zechariah Baumel, whose death was not officially confirmed until his remains were returned to Israel in April, 2019.
Read more at&nb...
BALTIMORE — The Office of the Inspector General used car GPS data and building entry data to prove that a Department of Transportation employee was putting down overtime for hours they didn’t work.
The OIG conducted an investigation regarding the abuse of overtime by an employee within the DOT.
According to OIG, they conducted a limited scope investigation based on a hotline complaint where a DOT employee worked 72 hours of overtime in a two-week period. During the investigation, the OIG learned the time period in question was during the Camden Yards sinkhole incident, which led to an influx of overtime.
The employee submitted overtime slips and was paid for eight hours of overtime from July 15-19 and July 22-24 starting at 5:00 a.m. and ending at 6:00 a.m.
The OIG learned ...