Category: 2022

Valuing the celebration, and celebrating the value There was a story going around about a wealthy man in the United States who was waiting for a train in the Subway. As he was reading his newspaper, he became less and less aware of the painted line on the ground below him, and he ventured too close to the edge. As his toes folded over the edge of the pit, he lost his balance and fell in, hurting himself badly on the hard tracks. “Help! Help!” the man cried. He was…

The Long-term Impact of COVID-19 on Today’s Youth By: Ilan Preskovsky It would be the height of chutzpah for someone like me, someone who is both unmarried and childless, to tell any parent that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on the lives of their adolescent or even pre-adolescent kids. So I won’t. I certainly wouldn’t dare to presume to explain to adolescents and children how Covid has affected them. No one needs me to spell out how challenging online school classes are or how disappointing it must…

Lessons from our Matric students and their teachers’ By: Chandrea Serebro Hirsch Lyons Girls High School What Corona taught me about teachers… From singing good morning songs, to wearing a pirate hat whilst exhibiting a puppet show to present the lessons, my high school teachers had to become quite ‘creative’ to keep us students coming back to their lessons each day over the lockdown periods. From my experience of online school, I have seen teachers’ major evolution in their online teaching skills. Firstly, I have been privileged to witness teachers’ transition…

By: Sharon Lurie Since I started making and selling salad dressings, my fridge has looked like a science project with every sized glass beaker and test tube available. Once you start making dressings, you don’t stop experimenting. Finally, after the thumbs-up from the ‘Lury Jury’ which now, Baruch Hashem, includes over 40 tasters, “Bobba Shar’s Heimishe dressing” made it onto the shelves and is available at most kosher outlets. Please G-d, next to join our condiments family will be a dark Thai-style dressing. The search for authentic dark ingredients was…

Helping our teens grow into greatness By: Paula Levin Parenting teenagers is not for the fainthearted. It’s brutal, thankless, confusing, painful, scary, and often heartbreaking. My mother in law tried to warn me when my kids were little – “It’s not all coochi-coo.” Boy was she right! The worst part is that we’re flying blind. I don’t know about you, but I never got a manual, and I literally don’t know what I’m doing. Fortunately, as a writer, I get to research, explore, and investigate the world, and speak to…

Lessons from our Matric students and their teachers’ By: Chandrea Serebro Hirsch Lyons Girls High School What Corona taught me about teachers… From singing good morning songs, to wearing a pirate hat whilst exhibiting a puppet show to present the lessons, my high school teachers had to become quite ‘creative’ to keep us students coming back to their lessons each day over the lockdown periods. From my experience of online school, I have seen teachers’ major evolution in their online teaching skills. Firstly, I have been privileged to witness teachers’ transition…

How Purim paved the way for the children to return Rabbi Dovid Samuels It once happened, about 500 years ago, that Rav Yosef Karo[1] was learning a particularly difficult part of Torah. He struggled to make sense of a certain commentary and toiled the entire night to try and figure it out. At daybreak, he finally reached a deep and clear understanding, and his hard work had paid off. As he made his way to his shul that morning, he walked past a man sitting and learning that very same…