Author: Congregation Beth El

Summer Chills: Murder Mysteries of Jewish Finland

July 26, 2019

By Robin Jacobson.  When a longtime crime reporter decides to try his hand at fiction, he might just discover that he has a talent for writing murder mysteries. This is …

Always An Immigrant

July 26, 2019

By Robin Jacobson.  As Moses might have said, “You can take the Jews out of Egypt, but you can’t take Egypt out of the Jews.” It is hard to shed …

Saving Children: Remembering Nicholas Winton on Yom HaShoah

May 1, 2019

By Robin Jacobson.  On a London train platform in the late 1930s, future children’s author Michael Bond noticed a sad huddle of Jewish refugee children with identity tags dangling from …

Memoirs That Tackle Big Life Questions

April 1, 2019

By Robin Jacobson.  The Passover Seder is a night of questions – questions about the stories we inherit, the nature of Jewish identity, and what we owe to strangers who …

Sparkling Tales of Once Upon A Time

March 1, 2019

By Robin Jacobson.  The holiday of Purim sparkles like a fairytale – costumes and carnivals; wine and song; and an age-old tale of a foolish King, a brave Queen and …

The Tug-of-War Over Kafka

February 4, 2019

By Robin Jacobson.   In March 1939, Max Brod fled his home in Czechoslovakia, just ahead of the Nazi invasion. Boarding the last train out of Prague before the borders closed, …

Hearing Echoes of the Past

January 2, 2019

By Robin Jacobson. A perennial source of fascination to physicists, philosophers, and poets is the nature of time. Does time progress along a straight line? Perhaps it ripples outward, like …

Calling Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Jewish Gambler

December 11, 2018

By Robin Jacobson.  Fans of British mysteries, especially of the Sherlock Holmes variety, will relish Conan Doyle for the Defense by Margalit Fox. This is a true story about Arthur …

Resisting Evil: Holocaust Books for Tweens and Teens

November 1, 2018

By Robin Jacobson.  This November marks the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”), considered by many to be the night the Holocaust began. A violent turning point in …

Two Sylvias and a Wedding

September 26, 2018

By Robin Jacobson.  On Simchat Torah, we reach the end of the Torah and begin reading it anew. The rabbis promise that each year’s reading offers new insights as our …