Section archive - Learning Resources

Since its launch five years ago, Jewish Heritage Europe has become an essential one-stop shop for news, information, and resources concerning, as the name indeed suggests, matters of Jewish culture and built heritage in Europe: museums; synagogues; cemeteries, and so on. Ruth Ellen Gruber, the author of Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe who has chronicled Jewish life in Europe for over twenty-five years for the JTA among other places, edits the site, which is supported by the Rothschild Foundation (Hanadiv) Europe. Here, Liam Hoare talks with Gruber about the site’s development and how European attitudes towards Jewish heritage have changed in the time she has been reporting on these issues.

Shalom and welcome to the 35th issue of Teaching the Legacy. Some months ago, we lost Elie Wiesel, survivor of Auschwitz, number A-7713, prolific author, Nobel laureate and the voice of many survivors. Elie Wiesel once said, “For whoever listens to a witness becomes a witness.” It is in this spirit that we present the current edition of Teaching the Legacy.

What does it mean to have a Jewish state? For one thing, when living in a non-Jewish society, we often rely on non-Jewish neighbors to help us navigate difficult areas of Jewish practice, such as running hospitals on Shabbat. In a predominantly Jewish society in which many public services are run by the state, alternative solutions must be developed in order to foster Shabbat observance in the public arena. In this virtual tour of the Zomet Institute’s “Experiential Visitor Center”, students go behind the scenes to understand how the Zomet Institute’s Rabbis and Engineers solve techno-halachic problems by developing innovative and ingenious devices that enable Israeli society to maintain Shabbat observance in a modern context.

On1Foot can help you easily create source sheets of Jewish texts on a variety of social justice issues. [Their name is an homage to the famous story of Hillel, in which Hillel guides a student who is looking to learn the entire Torah very efficiently, while standing on one foot.] On1Foot has a robust library of Jewish texts, including a large number of commentaries from the American Jewish World Service. You can find texts about many different social justice topics, including civil rights, the environment, tikkun olam, poverty and immigration, to name just a few. You can also specify the types of Jewish texts you are looking for like rabbinic, biblical or modern and whether you are searching for prayers, commentaries or stories.