170609 9th June 2017 Shabbat Shalom dear friends. I hope you managed to keep up with the constant news this week! Perhaps I should do a run down and then we can talk about other things. Let’s begin with the British elections of yesterday. If one looks at the map of the British Isles one could well…

170602 2nd June 2017 Shabbat Shalom! I hope you are well and not too disturbed by all the various news reports. If you are surprised by the about turn on moving the Embassy to Jerusalem then you have a very short memory! At least this time it is deferred by 6 months rather than vetoed. If you remember…

170526 26th May, 2017 Shabbat Shalom! How are you? I hope this week has been a little calmer than ours, but then this is Israel where we live life at a rate of knots and Jerusalem where every day is interesting! On Tuesday we watched the 5 helicopters circle and circle above us, occasionally shooting off…

170523 23rd May, 2017 What a tragedy. What a ghastly tragedy. Children spending a dream night at a concert starring their favourite pop star when an insanely radical Islamist, sent by ISIS, blew himself up taking 22 young lives, the youngest of whom was just 8 years old. He was not poor, he was not disenfranchised,…

170519 19th May 2017 Hello dear friends, I hope you are well. Just by the way, it isn’t that our politicians/leaders are any worse than before it’s just that now we know about it! The Sacred Cow is dead. For so many years, indeed until the current era of the Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook we were…

170512 12th May, 2017 Shabbat Shalom dear friends. How was your week? Mine was insanely busy but that means I am still alive and with it so, I guess that’s fine!!! Actually it has been a very busy news week too. Rather a “good news-bad news” wekk. It is good news that 82 girls have been…

170505 5th May 2017 Shabbat Shalom dear friends. A week of mourning and celebration, of anticipation and history, so let’s begin with a quote from my dear friend Rabbi Jeremy Rosen who as always has encapsulated my feelings in his very first sentence. ” Israel’s Independence Day, Yom Ha’atzmaut, brings out the best and the worst in…

170428 28th April 2017 Shabbat Shalom dear Friends  I just finished preparing the challah dough, setting the table for Shabbat and I heard it, the roar of jet planes overhead, swooping and diving, in perfect formations, four at a time. No we aren’t at war, as far as I know, the incredible pilots of the Israeli…

170420 20th April 2017 Shabbat Shalom dear friends. I hope your Pesach, Paschah, Easter went smoothly and that your home has returned to normal. Marwan Bargouti is in an Israeli prison for acts of terror, he receives more than the rights demanded by the Geneva Convention and he has completed his PhD while incarcerated. He is a…

170414 14th April 2017 Shabbat Shalom dear friends. Last evening in Jerusalem we were visiting friends when Rachel called me to switch on the television. “The Americans have bombed ISIS in Afghanistan” The description of “The Mother of all Bombs” immediately suggests that the United States was attacking in a vacuum, exhibiting her might rather…