The 11 Craziest Sukkahs In The World

With Sukkot coming up Sunday night, Jews around the world will be sitting in Sukkahs (or Sukkot) - outdoor huts with roofs of branches or reeds. While the basic blueprint is the same, different locations lend to some pretty crazy iterations.

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UN tosses sins into river in first-ever Tashlich ceremony

At Jewish pre-Yom Kippur service, Israeli envoy calls on world body to ‘reestablish role as temple of peace’

By Joshua Davidovich for The Times of Israel

New York’s East River was a little more polluted than usual Monday night, after United Nations envoys and other dignitaries dumped a year’s worth of trespasses and regrets out of their pockets and into Turtle Bay.

Among dignitaries taking part in the Jewish sin-cleansing rite of Tashlich were UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and envoys to the world body from the US, Britain, Canada, Australia, Ukraine, Brazil and elsewhere, including Israel.

The service, dating back to medieval Germany, is traditionally held next to a flowing body of water on or shortly after the Jewish Day of Atonement or Yom Kippur, and involves the symbolic casting off of sins, which usually take the form of bread, to be gobbled up by fish and other fauna.

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The High Holidays are upon us, check out our High Holidays Spotlight Kit

Singing Yiddish Road Songs With Syrian Refugees

By Lisa Goldman for Jewniverse

Thousands of Syrian asylum seekers have been stuck for weeks in Hungary, prevented by security forces from boarding trains that would take them to Germany, their final destination. The media has been showing horrible images of families with small children sleeping on the bare concrete outside the Budapest train station — scenes that inevitably churned up memories of the last time thousands of unwanted refugees were abused and shunted around Europe.

Eventually Austrian and German volunteers drove to Budapest and transported refugees to Germany in convoys of private cars. One of those volunteers is an Austrian singer named Hans Breuer, who filled his van with Syrian-Palestinian refugees. In this unforgettable video clip, Breur sings with them a famous old sentimental Yiddish lullaby, “Oyfn Veg Shteyt a Boym” (“A Tree at the Side of the Road“), and they join him in the wordless chorus (ay bitty bitty boym).

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Choose Your Rosh Hashanah Menu: Sephardi, Ashkenazi or Asian (With a Hint of Israeli)

Haaretz's food specialist Vered Guttman curates three menus for you to wow your Jewish New Year guests.

By Vered Guttman

Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews start the Rosh Hashanah meal with a series of symbolic foods.
Each of the foods, including black eyed pea, squash, pomegranate and dates, are accompanied by a blessing, called Yehi Ratzones (Yehi ratzon, meaning “May it be your will” in Hebrew), based on their name in Hebrew or Arabic.
This opens a window of opportunity of making a whole meal based on these food items, all of them in season now.
It also gives the beginning of the new year a new meaning.

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Check out Jvillage’s High Holiday+    page.

For more information and ideas visit our High Holidays Spotlight Kit