Rabbi Jessica Spitalnic Mates

Besides a few fans in the clergy office, I don’t know how many of you have heard of Shlomo Artzi. He is one of Israel’s most popular and enduring musicians. In his youth he sang songs of being a soldier, in his middle years he sang about love lost and

Last week I had the immense honor of attending and presenting at a Holocaust Conference at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado.  I was there to present about the Nuremberg Trials and also to learn from other scholars. There are many spectacular elements about the Air Force Academy. 

Last Sunday in religious school, the students and I studied the poem, The Shofar Breaks Your Heart by Dane Kuttler. The poem is about a little girl who is given the gift of a shofar and desires so deeply to touch, learn about and sound the shofar. The poem begins…

I have never been inside my son’s apartment in Los Angeles but I stare at the door from time to time hoping to see a glimpse of him…on Amazon. Often when he has something delivered, I will look at the picture the delivery driver posts of the arrived package and

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum doesn’t open till 10:00 am, but for the seminar I attended in early June during my sabbatical we had to arrive there at 9:15 am. That meant we used the back entrance of the of the museum in Washington, DC. So I didn’t see

I sleep well, probably once every five nights. This ratio is resonant of advice I was given about my picky eater son when he was a toddler – as long as he eats one in five meals he’s good. It was a lesson for me back then that it is

The Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) in Worcester, Massachusetts or what my brother-in-law calls “The Irish Club,” starts celebrating St. Patrick’s Day over a week before March 17th. I started following the Worcester branch of The Ancient Order of the Hibernians on Facebook when my nephew did his bar mitzvah project

This week in our eighth-grade ethics class we started off by listening to songs by pop stars Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande. The songs we listened to involved both young women defining themselves not by their characteristics, but by the men they had dated or will date in the future.

The first time I encountered antisemitism was in college. It wasn’t directed at me per se, but it was a rally against Israel equating Israel with South Africa, and then, as now; Anti-Zionism is antisemitism. I never forgot that rally. It was an odd, new and uncomfortable moment for me

There was a trend on social media a while back called “How It Started…How It’s Going.” People posted a picture from the beginning of a relationship or friendship, or of a child from many years ago, and then a current picture. People posted their first dates or wedding photos and