Book Bag

New two-volume set of ‘Sefer Hamitzvos’ to ease study for students of all ages

Rabbi finds everyday advice embedded in the Torah’s verses.

New set presents the comprehensive beginnings of Chabad thought

New materials and online classes for monumental 1912 work

Rabbi Yossy Goldman, one of the best-known rabbis in South Africa and author of one of the most-popular columns on the Judaism website Chabad.org, has compiled his commentaries on the weekly Torah reading into a new book that aims for an audience as varied as the Jewish world.

A Scandinavian expatriate who witnessed the destruction of Europe from the relative safety of Stockholm returns to the city of her youth in a new book exploring the country’s history during World War II and in its aftermath.

Scholars for generations have tried to decipher the seemingly simplistic words of Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki, the 12th-century commentator known as Rashi whose glosses on the Five Books of Moses have become standard fare for any student of the Torah.

A team of Brooklyn, N.Y., translators and scholars is moving forward with the release of the memoirs of Rebbetzin Chana Schneerson, mother of the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, digging in to the collection’s storied second volume, a collection of episodic recollections penned in Yiddish, Russian and Hebrew.

Jewish communities throughout the world will be celebrating a momentous achievement this weekend: the completion over the past 11 months of the study of the Mishneh Torah, the foundational legal code authored by the 12th century sage Rabbi Moses Maimonides.

When eight-year-old Klara, standing beside her father on the German MS S. Louis ocean-liner, sees Miami with her bare eyes, her father sighs and says, “So near, and yet so far.”

The writings and transcribed lectures of Rabbi Meir Chaim Chaikin, a Talmudic scholar who endured Soviet labor camps for three years as punishment for his clandestine efforts to strengthen Jewish life, have for the first time been published.

She was, in her own words, “not a writer, nor the daughter of a writer,” but the recently-discovered second volume of handwritten recollections of Rebbetzin Chana Schneerson provide a moving portrayal of some of the most gut-wrenching persecutions to befall one of the most illustrious scholars of previous generations.

A recent discovery of a never-before published marginal notation made by the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, has shed light on his enormous undertaking to compile all of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement’s teachings into an orderly index arranged by subject.

Rabbi Mendy Cohen has written a new book analyzing the philosophical underpinnings to Maimonides’ landmark code of Jewish law and the critical gloss authored by Rabbi Abraham ben David, the 12th-century French commentator better known by his acronymic, the Raavad.

A select group of Philadelphia suburbanites is putting the Jewish Bible to the test by reviewing an as-yet unreleased new version with a broad-based commentary as part of their regular Torah study sessions.

Bringing the storied Chabad-Lubavitch publishing house full circle, a new Haggadah offers modern-day English-speaking participants in the Passover Seder a contemporary look at the millennia-old ceremony by relying on classic commentaries and the first order of service compiled by the Rebbe in 1940.

A new volume of correspondence belonging to the Sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, of righteous memory, sheds new light on the Berlin and Paris lives of his daughter and the son-in-law who would succeed him, particularly the increasing push by the Jewish leader for his son-in-law to assume ever more vital and public roles.

Long recognized as a one of the most brilliant minds of the past generations, but whose writings were primarily relegated to the purview of a small cadre of scholars, the Rogatchover Gaon – literally, the “genius of Rogatchov” – has for many years occupied a lofty space, inaccessible to the masses.