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Amal Elsana Alh’jooj has lead an extraordinary life. She grew up in a Bedouin village in the Negev Desert. In the traditional Bedouin community, boys are favored over girls so according to her parents – as Amal reminisces – the arrival of a baby girl amounted to a near tragedy. Her mother and father were … Read more

Right in the heart of downtown Tel Aviv, is a building 3 stories high. It is not an office block, or shops, or apartments, but the former home of Matilda and Daniel Recanati, a Greek-Israeli Jewish family of a dynasty of bankers, that is now a center for Israeli civilians and soldiers suffering from Post … Read more

With over 1500 songs to his credit, the most prolific American songwriter of all time is Israel Beilin, known more widely as “Irving Berlin.”  Over a century ago, Berlin’s parents emigrated from an antisemitic Belarus and settled in America. His father had been the cantor at the little shtetl’s synagogue. Berlin, entirely self-taught, became a … Read more

In a divided world where journalists bravely (or stupidly) put themselves on the forefront of criticism, it is rare that a reporter would garnish respect from both sides of the political divide.  Such is the case with Zvi Yehezkeli. Aside from once being voted among Israel’s most handsome men, he is Israel’s most famous Arabist: … Read more

Christine Hon has fought for everything she has achieved, and what she has achieved, and how she has achieved it, is nothing short of extraordinary: Christine is the first Circassian lawyer in Israel. She is also the only woman in her village who owns a private law firm.  Originating in the Caucasus, many of the … Read more

Pinhas Rutenberg was born in 1879 in the Russian city of Romney. It was a city of wealthy farmers, upon which, the unique kibbutz experiment would be based. As a child, Rotenberg received a traditional religious education and went on to study in the secular Hebrew high school. Pinhas excelled and was later accepted to … Read more

We have all experienced a moment that changes our lives forever – for good or for bad. Dutch-born Israeli Dov Frohman, has known moments like these, and he has experienced them to the extreme. Two decades before the outbreak of World War II, Poland was rife with antisemitism and unfair taxations imposed upon the Jewish … Read more

Religion and politics are an inseparable part of the fabric of Israeli society. Every Israeli citizen knows what religion their neighbors are, and due to the vibrant dialogue where it is opinions that count, people know who their neighbors vote for. The gap created by these differences is sometimes a difficult one to bridge. This … Read more

Like most Israeli men, Rami Levi wears T-shirts and blends in with the other majority of his causally dressed countrymen. An ordinary guy, he could be mistaken for a cab driver, a gardener, a felafel seller, or anyone’s neighbor.  But nothing about what Rami Levi has done is “ordinary.”  Born to a Turkish family of … Read more

Israelis are in the fortunate position of being able to understand the Bible in the original language. They are also in the rather bizarre position of knowing that when they post on Facebook, tweet on Twitter (or order that Pizza with a double topping of cheese) they are doing so in the language of the … Read more

Alert, smart, a natural sheepdog, aggressive yet faithful and trainable, everything about the Canaan dog suggests this is the dog of the Bible. Yet the story of the renaissance of this dog, now the national dog of the State of Israel, is like the survival of Israel, nothing short of a miracle.  The story begins … Read more

Even though wine has been produced in the Land of Israel since Biblical times, Bouquet, Blend, Terroir and Grand Cru, were terms that Israelis little once cared for. The finesse of wine culture was reserved for the likes of continental Europe, South America and California. Israelis were content with one brand of sweet Kiddush wine … Read more

Many Jews in Europe have favored the violin as their instrument. The choice is rooted in convenience. Escaping from pogroms with the likes of a piano was a lot more cumbersome than just grabbing a violin.  At the age of four, Bronisław Huberman was given that most Jewish of instruments by his poverty-stricken Polish parents. … Read more

A household name, she is affectionately known throughout Israel as “Safta (Grandma) Jamila.” Born and raised in a Druze family in the Galilee village of Peki’in, Safta Jamila’s life reads like a fairy tale.  Her early years were of wretched poverty. Married at 16, by the time she was 21, she was already a mother … Read more

For the last few years, a quarter of a million Israelis have been studying a chapter of the Bible a day, for five days a week. Known simply as “929” (after the number of chapters in the Hebrew Bible), via a website and an app, the program offers various commentaries, thoughts for the day, the … Read more

In 1947, 24-year old Gavriel Sissmann boarded a Mossad ship with his fellow Shoah survivors to sail to British Mandate Palestine. The ship was Intercepted by the British and redirected to Cyprus. While in a DP camp Sissmann joined the clandestine Jewish Haganah. Two years later he reached the Promised Land.  As with all immigrants, … Read more

The date palm is mentioned in the  Bible several times, but ever since the exile of the Jewish people to Babylon, the tree died out in the Land of Israel. It was only in the 1930’s when Ben Zion Israeli, an ardent Ukrainian-born Zionist wanted to plant a Biblical garden in honor of Rachel Bluwstein, … Read more

With her father, five brothers and thousands of other Ethiopian Jews, three-year-old Pnina Tamano-Shata trekked on foot under the blazing sun across an African desert from Ethiopia all the way to Sudan. Operation Moses, a clandestine and daring escapade that took two months, was done in coordination with the IDF, Mossad, Sudan and the CIA. … Read more

n English, if someone is referred to as a Philistine, it describes someone with bad table manners, or the lazy person who sits in front of the TV drinking beer who has never picked up a book in his or her life. There is a misnomer that Philistines were rude and uneducated. The Philistines first … Read more

There is always construction going on in Israel, whether it be to house new Jewish immigrants coming from the four corners of the world, or infrastructure needed for a thriving economy. It was during the clearing of the ground to lay the foundations of a hotel that the ancient town of Migdal was discovered.  Migdal, … Read more

Due to the slaughter of Jews and Muslims that the Crusaders perpetrated on their bloody crusades in, and on their way to, “liberate the Holy Land,” they are not very highly thought of in Israel or throughout the Middle East. Their stay in Israel was a comparative mere two hundred years, and according to historians, … Read more

Unless you are Israeli, or a keen bird-watcher, you have probably never heard of him. But not only is he legendary as the Birdman of Israel, Yossi Leshem has also quietly saved lives.  After serving in the Israeli Air Force, Yossi, a bird enthusiast, set up a field school in Har Gilo, a neighborhood in … Read more

Simcha Blass, a Polish Jew who immigrated to Israel a decade before World War II, changed the world forever.  Growing up in Warsaw, antisemitism and poverty that impacted him and his other fellow Jews prompted Simcha to “check out his future,” in the Jewish homeland which was then under the control of the British. Before … Read more

Like many improbable ideas, Israel sending a spacecraft to the moon was also born in a bar. In 2011, while sipping beer in a suburb of Tel Aviv, three young friends, Yonatan Winetraub, Kfir Damari and Yariv Bash, decided that all they needed to send a spacecraft to the moon was a meager $100 million … Read more