Israel--a Spiritual Travel Guide


Book Description

The only travel guide to Israel that will help you to prepare spiritually for your visit. Combining ancient blessings, medieval prayers, biblical references, and modern poetry?in quick reference format?it helps today's pilgrim tap into deep spiritual meaning of the ancient?and modern?sites of the Holy Land. For each of the twenty-five major tourist destinations?from the Western Wall to Masada to a kibbutz in Galilee?it gives guidance in sharply focused four-step sections: ? Anticipation: To read in advance. Information to help orient you in the site's historical context. ? Approach: To read on the way there. Readings from traditional and modern sources to orient you in the site's spiritual context. ? Acknowledgment: To read at the site. A prayer or blessing to integrate the experience into your spiritual consciousness. ? Afterthought: Journaling space for writing your own thoughts and impressions.




Jewish Journeys: The Second Temple Period to the Bar Kokhba Revolt: 536 Bce-136 Ce


Book Description

This beautifully Illustrated history book is the the first volume to be published in a planned six-volume series directed at Jewish young adults. It is noteworthy that this inaugural volume tells the story of Jews returning to the Land of Israel, while the Diaspora continues to thrive in a world of superpowers which clash and cooperate - a period not unlike our own. We hope that this series will go some way to rectify the ignorance of our unique, long, and complex history, and to enable future Jewish adults to understand both their past and ground their future in a changing and evolving world.




Jewish Journeys in Jerusalem


Book Description

Jewish Journeys in Jerusalem: A Tourist's Guide is a travel guide designed to give tourists a Jewish experience when visiting the city. The book covers interesting background about popular sites and fascinating details about lesser-known places. How was the Talmudic era grave of Nicanor found? Which places give the best views of the Temple Mount? Where can you walk on the roof of the Old City? How did the Geula neighborhood get its name? Whether this is your first trip to Jerusalem or one of many, this book is bound to greatly enhance your understanding and appreciation of the city.




Ten Days of Birthright Israel


Book Description

The remarkable story of Birthright Israel, an intensive ten-day educational program designed to connect Jewish young adults to their heritage




The Founding of Israel


Book Description

A chronological history of the Jewish people—from the earliest attempts to establish a homeland during Biblical times to the creation of Israel. More than seventy years ago in 1948, the State of Israel came into being amidst great controversy. How did the state arise? What led to the founding of Israel? This book sets out to give a chronological journey of the Jewish people from the time Abraham came out of the land of Ur three thousand years ago, until six million of them died in the horror of the Holocaust under Hitler and his Nazi regime. It recounts the many expulsions from the land in which they lived, the suffering under Babylonians, Greeks, Persians, the destruction of their temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD, and finally, genocide and the expulsion by the Romans in 132 AD creating a diaspora across the world. The Jews would be charged with killing God and throughout the following centuries would be expelled from countries, burned alive after being locked in synagogues or at the stake, have all their property seized, and get herded into ghettoes. All of this until that fatal Holocaust, which attempted to wipe them from the face of the earth. This book recounts their story to achieve a homeland, using a wide-range of historical documents to tell the story of humiliation, suffering, poverty, and death. It tells of religious persecution that would not let them rest, and as their journey enters the twentieth century, gives a behind-the-scenes look at how governments manipulated the Middle East and exacerbated divisions.




Jewish Journeys


Book Description

The 'journey' is at the heart of the Jewish experience - an anthology of Jewish 'travel writing'




The Jewish Journey


Book Description

"These are some of the remarkable Jewish objects in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, brought together here for the first time to tell the history of the Jewish people from Ancient Mesopotamia to the present day. Spanning 4000 years and fourteen countries, they document the astonishing diversity and adaptability of Jewish life over the centuries, and the long history of close interaction with other cultures and religions of the world."--Publisher's description.




The Seventh Heaven


Book Description

Internationally renowned essayist and cultural commentator Ilan Stavans spent five years traveling from across a dozen countries in Latin America, in search of what defines the Jewish communities in the region, whose roots date back to Christopher Columbus’s arrival. In the tradition of V.S. Naipaul’s explorations of India, the Caribbean, and the Arab World, he came back with an extraordinarily vivid travelogue. Stavans talks to families of the desaparecidos in Buenos Aires, to “Indian Jews,” and to people affiliated with neo-Nazi groups in Patagonia. He also visits Spain to understand the long-term effects of the Inquisition, the American Southwest habitat of “secret Jews,” and Israel, where immigrants from Latin America have reshaped the Jewish state. Along the way, he looks for the proverbial “seventh heaven,” which, according to the Talmud, out of proximity with the divine, the meaning of life in general, and Jewish life in particular, becomes clearer. The Seventh Heaven is a masterful work in Stavans’s ongoing quest to find a convergence between the personal and the historical.




Journey to Jerusalem


Book Description

With emphasis on the current Mid-East situation, a journalist tells the personal stories of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim families living in the holy city of Jerusalem.




Jewish Travel in Antiquity


Book Description

This book provides the first comprehensive study of Jewish travel and mobility in Hellenistic and Roman times, based on a critical analysis of Jewish, Graeco-Roman, and early Christian literary, epigraphic, and archaeological sources and a social-historical evaluation of the material. Catherine Hezser shows that certain segments of ancient Jewish society were quite mobile. Mobility seems to have increased in the later Roman period, when an extensive road system facilitated travel within the province of Syria-Palestine and the neighbouring Middle Eastern regions. Second Temple Judaism was centralized, with Jerusalem as its central space and seat of priestly authority. In post-70 rabbinic Judaism, on the other hand, connections between rabbis could be established through mutual visits and second- and third-degree contacts only. Mobility formed the basis of the establishment of a decentralized rabbinic network in Palestine and Babylonia in late antiquity. Numerous narrative and halakhic traditions indicate the importance of mobility for communication and the exchange of knowledge amongst rabbis. It is argued that the rabbis who were most mobile sat at the nodal points of the rabbinic network and elicited the largest amount of influence. They would have combined business travel with scholarly exchange. Scholars' journeys between Palestine and Babylonia are viewed within the wider context of Rome and Persia's economic and cultural exchange in which Jews, just like Christians, may have played the role of intermediaries.