You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
From Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet, respected Torah scholar, prolific author, and beloved teacher, comes a beautifully written and fascinating scholarly memoir. Beginning with his childhood on Washington Avenue in the Bronx, he writes candidly of growing up in a post-World War II world where Lithuanian Torah scholars were transplanted to the soil of twentieth-century America, of the ideological clashes between Hasidim, Mitnagdim, and the modern world, and of his personal encounters with dozens of well-known Jewish personalities - including his rebbe, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. From the world of Yeshiva University, to aliyah to Israel, to becoming a key player in teaching Torah in the refusenik Russian community, Rabbi Rakeffet writes his well-researched memoirs with candor, tremendous insight, and a great deal of humor. With the cancellation of the security clause, he is able to narrate the fascinating inside story of the covert emissaries sent behind the Iron Curtain.
"This first volume recounts the details of the lives of the Rav and his forebears. This volume and the next constitute a scholarly attempt to detail the quests and ideas of one of the major personalities of modern American Jewish Orthodoxy". -- Jacket.
From Simon & Schuster, The Halakchic Mind is an essay on Jewish tradition and modern thought from Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. Discusses the conflict between philosophy and science, examines the growth of religious knowledge, and shows how the Halakha, Jewish religious law, can be used to formulate a new religious outlook.
Focus on family relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children.The essays develop a Jewish theory of marriage and sexuality, parenthood and the duty to honor and revere one's parents.
"Rabbi Yehudah Amital, who has served for almost forty years as head of one of Israel's leading yeshivot, Yeshivat Har Etzion, is a Holocaust survivor. Throughout his career, he has attempted to address the Holocaust and its ramifications on both the educational and spiritual levels. Rabbi Amital's confrontation with the memory of the Holocaust is characterized by authenticity, honesty and courage." "This book analyzes his original religious approach, against the background of other views, especially those of his fellow Religious Zionists. This work presents the reader with the direct and painful grappling of an educator and thinker with the most terrible event in human history."--Jacket.
Joseph Dan, the Gershom Scholem Professor of Kabbalah Emeritus at the Hebrew University and long-time Professor of Jewish Studies at the Freie Universitat Berlin, is one of the most influential figures in the fields of Jewish mystical thought, homiletical and ethical literature, modern Messianism and Hasidism, and contemporary 'belles-lettres'. His studies of the diverse aspects of Jewish creativity, with close attention to the dialectics of religious-cultural continuity versus historical innovation, provide a comprehensive overview of the complex history of Jewish thought and its multiple creative faces. It is precisely for this reason, to honor Joseph Dan's multifaceted research, that his ...
One of the most remarkable heroes of the Holocaust was Solomon Schonfeld, a young British rabbi who personally rescued thousands of Jews during the tragic decade of 1938-1948. Rabbi of a small Orthodox congregation and pioneer of the Jewish day school movement in London, England, Schonfeld was inspired by Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl, to get into rescue work. Under the auspices of the Chief Rabbi's Religious Emergency Council, this dynamic and charismatic personality, single handedly brought to England several thousand youngsters, as well as rabbis, teachers, ritual slaughterers, and other religious functionaries. Schonfeld obtained kosher homes, Jewish education, and jobs for his charges. He also created unique mobile synagogues--the first to serve the spiritual and physical needs of the survivors in the liberated areas of Europe. He also tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade the British government to bomb Auschwitz. This fascinating biography, with a focus on his rescue efforts, includes his struggles with the assimilationist Anglo-Jewish leadership, as well as forty vignettes by individuals he rescued.