Jewish History

Let’s take a look at epidemics throughout history to gain some insight into how Jews were affected and how leaders responded.

Jewish history can be viewed as a string of miracles, massacres and movements, or it can be seen as a meaningful and significant story, in which each of us plays an important, ongoing role. But finding the meaningful threads and sewing them together into ...

Israel-focused charity cited for its professionalism and effectiveness

With the outbreak of the American Revolution, out-of-the-way Statia played a major logistical role for the Continental Army.

It was in Sweden, I think, that the unique nature of America first dawned on me. I was 21, a counselor in a Jewish overnight camp held in the town of Skara, about an hour and a half northeast of Gothenburg. By that point I had traveled widely, but there w...

The mystery began with a tantalizing clue: a woman without a name, known only through her relationship to someone else. In a letter written by the sixth Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, to Rabbi Mordechai Heifetz, Also sometimes written as Cheifet...

Just after midnight on Wednesday, June 15, 1927, agents of the Soviet secret police, then known as the OGPU, barged into the Leningrad apartment of the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, of righteous memory, and arrested him. Over ...

An international diplomatic crisis heightened the threat to the Rebbe’s life and helped secure his deliverance.

In the winter of 1986, Yitzchak and Sofya Kogan finally received the Soviet exit visas they had waited 14 years for. Naturally, they were thrilled—but much had changed since they first applied in 1972. Like thousands of other Soviet Jews, they still wante...

In Eastern Europe, there is a truth that lurks just beneath the surface. Beyond the glitz of new developments and predating the drab grayness of Soviet-era construction lie remnants of a lost Jewish world and its inhabitants. Synagogues, yeshivahs, Jewish...