Miriam Shaviv's blog

Chabad are certainly the PR masters.

Each summer, some 400 young rabbis are sent to far-flung communities in order to make contact with local Jews, as part of a programme called 'Roving Rabbis'. This year they are running a blog about their experiences - which is actually quite interesting.

In this post, for example, two young Lubavitchers meet a mental patient at a top-security hospital in Connecticut:

Tzohar, a (usually) wonderful group that does much to advance religious-secular relations in Israel, held its annual conference recently - and for once focused on issues affecting the religious community. One of the topics that came up was how Orthodox parents deal with children who leave the path of religion.

In the course of Ha'aretz's piece on the conference, reporter Yair Sheleg comes up with this astonishing claim:

The former long-time Egyptian ambassador to Israel, Mohammad Bassiouni, has provoked the wrath of the Egyptian authorities after claiming that he was sent to Israel primarily as a spy; calling Ariel Sharon a "sleeping corpse"; and confirming allegations that Nasser's brother-in-law, Ashraf Marwan, who fell off a balcony in London late last year in mysterious circumstances, was a double agent working for both the Israelis and the Egyptians.

But one magnificent quote stands head-and-shoulders above the rest:

Julie Burchill - the most enthusiastic advocate of Jews and Zionism in the British media - has made an amazing discovery:

The key witness in one of the several cases against Israeli Prime Minster Ehud Olmert, American businessman Morris Talansky, has declared that he won’t be returning to Israel in order to complete his testimony.

Olmert’s people say this shows how unreliable a witness he is – and leaves the prosecution’s case in tatters. The prosecution retorts that its case is still strong, and that Olmert will still be indicted.

And I hope the prosecution is right.

Why?

The Rabbinical Centre of Europe (RCE) was recently confronted with an unusual halachic question. As their press release explains:

A German Jew who passed away had expressed as his last will a peculiar request: to be buried together with a bottle of Vodka.

• -- A court in Illinois has struck down a will by a couple who stipulated that their grandchildren would only receive their inheritance if they married within the Jewish faith. This piece argues the decision was correct

-- London isn’t the only place where an eruv fight has turned ugly:

This week, I wrote about the serious security implications of the story of the little girl who got left behind at Ben-Gurion airport while her family flew on to Paris.

How, I asked, could an airplane take off from such a security-sensitive airport with luggage on board that did not belong to any passenger? Isn't this a basic security no-no?

Now it emerges that the same problem exists on planes coming into Israel. As Haim Watzman blogs:

Many of you will have caught the feature in the Guardian this week on Germans who converted to Judaism and are now living in Israel.
It included a rather remarkable interview with an unnamed professor of Jewish Studies at one of Israel’s universities, who claims that his grandmother Erna was, at one point, married to one Hans Hitler – the illegitimate child of Adolph’s half-brother, Alois Jr.
As he explains:

The Israeli Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi, Yona Metzger, recently called on women to take on their husband's surname.

As a married woman who (mostly) still uses her maiden name, I am grateful to blogger Lion of Zion for providing this fascinating reminder that the way we allocate surnames has changed greatly throughout the centuries - and that a woman taking on her husband's name was not, historically, the only Jewish practice.

As he explains: