If someone told me a year and a half ago that I would move to Israel for 10 months, I am pretty confident I would not believe them.

Maria Mandel was the SS commander of the women's camp at Auschwitz- Birkenau.

You don’t have to travel far to hear the music of the world. Experience the multi-cultural sounds and entrancing fusions of Hebrew, Arabic and Ethiopian with a full-length concert by The Idan Raichel Project at this year’s Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israel’s Independence Day) celebration on April 23!

Dozens of Jews from war-torn eastern Ukraine who will be immigrating to Israel in the coming days celebrated the upcoming holiday of Passover at a simulated seder (ritual meal) held at The Jewish Agency for Israel's refugee center outside the city of Dnepropetrovsk Sunday evening (March 29). The celebrants included seven children between the ages of two and ten, who learned about the holiday for the first time.

Recently, my two housemates and I hosted 20 young Jewish professionals from St. Petersburg, Russia in our home for Shabbat dinner, along with a small number of young Clevelanders.

Passover is synonymous with cleaning, shopping, and cooking. With all of the physical preparations, however, it’s easy to arrive spent and exhausted to the Passover Seder, and lose track of what Passover is really about - the retelling of the miraculous emancipation of our ancestors from Egypt, and the celebration of our transformation from slaves to a self-determining nation of free men and women.