Ben Bag News Today

Called the ‘Global Community Torah,’ the project, launched in honor of Sefaria’s 10th anniversary, is the first digital Torah scroll that provides the opportunity for Jews of all ages and backgrounds to participate in its writing — all 304,805 letters

From the blog of David Lerner at The Times of Israel

From the blog of Sruli Fruchter at The Times of Israel

It may sound counter-intuitive to ask why we need to count Jews, after a third of our number were exterminated in the Holocaust. But there are critical ethical, if not statistical, reasons to push back against our demographic obsession, not least when Israel is doing it

“Great leaders create great leaders” is an oft-quoted phrase in many of the recent tributes to Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, whose first yahrzeit was marked on the 20th of Cheshvan.

  The Haredim will be the first to admit that their existence today is little short of miraculous. For centuries, the traditional Jewish way of life suffered one setback after another, each more perilous than the last. First came the Emancipation, which threw open the doors of modern culture to Eastern European Jews; after generations in the confines of ghetto and shtetl, where the Jewish religion was preserved in its traditional forms, many Jews began the journey toward secularism. So, too, i...