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Deborah Fineblum

Deborah Fineblum

Deborah Fineblum is a freelance writer and book author who made aliyah on July 4, 2013.

Long before Shavuot became a celebration of receiving the Torah, it was known as the Feast of Weeks and designated a harvest holiday.
Timed to coincide with Yom Hashoah—the day all of Israel stops to remember the Holocaust—“Before My Very Eyes,” the Yad Vashem Educational Center for Holocaust Remembrance, is opening at the Ariel Sharon Israel Defense Forces’ training campus in the Negev Desert.
“The Torah takes the rhetorical thunder of our oppressors and throws it back in their faces to tell God’s own truth,” says Rabbi Dr. Joshua Berman.
What makes the play work is that the story is “both highly personal and universal—one family’s loss and the trauma of terror, a story that’s heart-wrenching and inspiring at the same time,” says Yael Valier, creative director of Theater and Theology.
“You want to be Cinderella going to the ball or King Ahasuerus? I tell my employees. ‘Remember that no matter who’s standing in front of you, she is now Cinderella, and you need to treat her like Cinderella,’ ” says Tel Aviv costume-store owner Rami Patimer.
Organizers at the Illinois Holocaust Museum chose International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27 for the official rollout of their new cutting-edge virtual-reality Holocaust experience, titled “The Journey Back.”
“Young Jews don’t need safe space; they need brave space—an understanding of what it means to engage with Israel. But we can’t ask them to be advocates until they know something,” said Rachel Fish, founder of the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism.
New program will help “make the Jewish catastrophe a firm fact in the international consciousness, a fact beyond denial—in the hope that the world which turned a blind eye during World War II will not do so again and will ensure that such events never recur,” says Dr. Miriam Adelson.
Masha Merkulova was unwilling to wait for a year-long synagogue committee process to come up with a program to grow students’ personal relationship with Israel. “We needed a curriculum right then,” she says. “Within two days I’d found one.”
“This field is a testament to who he was; it’s a bridge between our new olim and the other Israeli families who are learning what baseball is all about, and between Ezra and his family, and the families in Ra’anana,” said the Israeli city’s Mayor Chaim Broyde.
The pent-up flurry follows the Israeli government lifting its ban on visitors. So if you’re planning on going, you’re in for a treat.
“All the times we were here as tourists were a lot of fun, but you don’t know what it’s like until you put your skin in here. Once you do that jump of hope, you start seeing life in a new way, through Israeli glasses,” says Shira Denise Kilemnic Mac.