This evening at sundown begins The Three Weeks

Overview and laws of the period leading up to Tisha B'Av. From aish.com

The "Three Weeks" between the 17th of Tammuz and the Tisha B'Av have historically been days of misfortune and calamity for the Jewish people. During this time, both the First and Second Temples were destroyed, amongst other terrible tragedies.

These days are referred to as the period "within the straits" (bein hametzarim), in accordance with the verse: "all her oppressors have overtaken her within the straits" (Lamentations 1:3).

On Shabbat during the Three Weeks, the Haftorahs are taken from chapters in Isaiah and Jeremiah dealing with the Temple's destruction and the exile of the Jewish people.

During this time, various aspects of mourning are observed by the entire nation. We minimize joy and celebration. And, since the attribute of Divine judgement (“din”) is acutely felt, we avoid potentially dangerous or risky endeavors.

ASPECTS OF MOURNING DURING THE THREE WEEKS
 

1. No weddings are held. (However, engagement ceremonies are permitted.)
2. We do not listen to music.
3. We avoid all public celebrations -- especially those which involve dancing and musical accompaniment.
4. We avoid exciting and entertaining trips and activities. (Kaf HaChaim - OC 551:41)
5. No haircuts or shaving. (Fingernails may be clipped up until the week in which Tisha B'Av falls.)
6. We do not say the blessing She-hechianu on new food or clothes, except on Shabbat.

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17th of Tammuz: History, Laws and Customs

From Chabad.org

The Day Jerusalem’s Walls Were Breached

Begins at sundown July 14th

The fast of the 17th of the Hebrew month of Tammuz, known as Shivah Asar B’Tammuz, is the start of a three-week mourning period for the destruction of Jerusalem and the two Holy Temples.

The fast actually commemorates five tragic events that occurred on this date:

1. Moses broke the tablets when he saw the Jewish people worshipping the Golden Calf.
2. During the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem, the Jews were forced to cease offering the daily sacrifices due to the lack of sheep.
3. Apostomos burned the holy Torah.1
4. An idol was placed in the Holy Temple.2
5. The walls of Jerusalem were breached by the Romans, in 69 CE, after a lengthy siege. (Three weeks later, after the Jews put up a valiant struggle, the Romans destroyed the second Holy Temple on the 9th of Av.)  The Jerusalem Talmud maintains that this is also the date when the Babylonians breached the walls of Jerusalem on their way to destroying the first Temple.

Practically speaking:

• Healthy adults—bar- or bat-mitzvah age and older—abstain from eating or drinking between dawn and nightfall. Click here for exact times in your location.
• Pregnant and nursing women may not have to fast. Someone who is ill should consult with a rabbi. Even those exempt from fasting, such as ill people or children, shouldn’t indulge in delicacies or sweets.

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The Med-School Reject Who Created ‘Gilligan’s Island’ and ‘The Brady Bunch’

With no Jewish holidays coming up immediately, we bring you profiles of some well known and some not so well known Jews. Enjoy.

A new book on sitcoms shows how the late Sherwood Schwartz, N.J. Jew in L.A., invented the modern high-concept comedy

By Saul Austerlitz for Tablet Magazine

Sherwood Schwartz, a well-regarded young television writer in the early 1960s, had pitched a show about seven desert-island castaways trapped together to his longtime agent in Hollywood and got an unexpectedly virulent answer: “Sherwood, you’re out of your fucking mind. Who the hell is going to watch the same goddamn seven people on the same goddamn island every week?”

Schwartz changed agents and wrote out 31 two-to-three-sentence story ideas on a long roll of butcher paper he tacked up in his office and brought the roll into his next meeting. While CBS bought the show almost immediately, network president Jim Aubrey was insistent that it required far too much explanation of its guiding premise each week to make sense to viewers. Schwartz believed otherwise: His goal was to find a setup that would force disparate characters together without anyone being able to leave. “All my shows, actually, are how do people learn to get along with each other?” he would later note.

Aubrey’s objections, Schwartz insisted, would be solved by the show’s introductory theme song: He originally had a Harry Belafonte–inspired calypso rhythm in mind but was ultimately convinced to abandon it in favor of the sea-chantey style of the final version, which introduced the five passengers, the three-hour tour, and the tiny ship that got tossed. And so Gilligan’s Island was born.

Schwartz was born in 1916 in Passaic, N.J.—a wool town just over from the silk-producing city of Paterson. His parents had lost two children before Sherwood, and his father, a grocer, went broke during the Depression. Sherwood’s older brother Al was dead-set on becoming a writer, but his parents insisted he attend law school. Al passed the bar exam, handed his mother his diploma, then said, “Here, now I can write.”

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Leonard Nimoy's Mameloshn: A Yiddish Story

With no Jewish holidays coming up immediately, we bring you profiles of some well known and some not so well known Jews. Enjoy.

Yes, Leonard Nimoy speaks Yiddish. Learn more about Leonard (Leyb) Nimoy from his Jewish roots in Boston's heymish West End neighborhood to his brief stint working with famous Yiddish theatre maven Maurice Schwartz in these video highlights from the Wexler Oral History Project's interview with the man made famous by his role as Spock on Star Trek.

 

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Comedian Jackie Mason Is Still Really, Really Funny

With no Jewish holidays coming up immediately, we bring you profiles of some well known and some not so well known Jews. Enjoy.

But in an in-depth interview with Tablet Magazine, he also gets serious about Israel, anti-Semitism, and why Italians love him

By David Evanier from a June 2013 interview in Tablet Magazine

I met Jackie Mason for the first time a few months ago at the kosher Great American Health Bar on West 57th Street in Manhattan. My friend Mike Fiorito went up to him and told him a joke. “What kind of a shmuck tells me a joke?” Mason said. I introduced myself and gave him my card. A month later he called me. We’ve been shmoozing together ever since.

Mason looks like his pictures from 20 years ago, with black hair and sad, alert eyes. He is intelligent, youthful, and nimble and strides across the street without looking right or left. Usually, he doesn’t have to. Wherever he goes, he is a conspicuous celebrity. Every time we walk down a Manhattan street together, he is greeted like a rock star by scores of people from all ethnic groups who go crazy at the sight of him. They run up to him and embrace him. Before he was 25, Mason left the hearth in Sheboygan, Wisc., and made his way to the Catskills, where he became an overnight sensation. He has remained a star in a much broader arena ever since.

What does it mean to you to be a Jew?

It means that the chances are you are going to be a more intelligent person, and you’ll have more decency, and you’ll help people whether they deserve it or not. And no matter what crime any person from any denomination commits, somehow you’ll always convince yourself it’s your fault.

Why have you stayed so identifiably Jewish in your accent and your subject matter?

I didn’t emphasize my Jewishness because I wanted to. I just happen to have been raised in a family where everybody happened to talk like this, so why would I talk like somebody else? And it’s not true that my act is about Judaism. It sounds like Judaism, but my act is about all kinds of people, but because I sound so Jewish, people are too stupid to separate the sound from the substance.

How did you become attracted to comedy?

I became attracted to it because I was a rabbi. And I started to tell jokes in my sermons.

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Ruth

Convert to Judaism and Great-Grandmother of King David

By Ariela Pelaia for About.com

According to the biblical Book of Ruth, Ruth was a Moabite woman who married into an Israelite family and eventually converted to Judaism. She is the great-grandmother of King David and hence an ancestor of the Messiah.
Ruth Converts to Judaism

Ruth's story begins when an Israelite woman, named Naomi, and her husband, Elimelech, leave their hometown of Bethlehem. Israel is suffering from famine and they decide to relocate to the nearby nation of Moab. Eventually Naomi's husband dies and Naomi's sons marry Moabite women named Orpah and Ruth.

After ten years of marriage both of Naomi's sons die of unknown causes and she decides that it is time to return to her homeland of Israel. The famine has subsided and she no longer has immediate family in Moab. Naomi tells her daughters-in-law about her plans and both of them say they want to go with her. But they are young women with every chance of remarrying, so Naomi advises them to stay in their homeland, remarry and begin new lives. Orpah eventually agrees, but Ruth insists upon staying with Naomi. "Don't urge me to leave you or to turn back from you," Ruth tells Naomi. "Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God." (Ruth 1:16).

Ruth's statement not only proclaims her loyalty to Naomi but her desire to join Naomi's people - the Jewish people. "In the thousands of years since Ruth spoke these words," writes Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, "no one has better defined the combination of peoplehood and religion that characterizes Judaism: 'Your people shall be my people' ('I wish to join the Jewish nation'), 'Your God shall be my God' ('I wish to accept the Jewish religion'). (Telushkin, Rabbi Joseph. "Biblical Literacy." pg. 359).

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Shavuot 2014

Shavuot begins at sunset on Tuesday, June 3 and will end on the evening of Thursday, June 5 2014.

What is Shavuot?

Shavuot, the feast of weeks, is celebrated seven weeks after the second Passover seder.

Although Shavuot began as an ancient grain harvest festival, the holiday has been identified since biblical times with the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai.

Read more about the history of Shavuot.

What are some customs and practices for Shavuot?

- To commemorate the giving of the Torah at Sinai there is a tradition of staying up all night studying Jewish texts in what is called a tikun
- On Shavuot the Book of Ruth is read.
- Traditionally dairy foods are eaten on Shavuot.
- In order to mark the agricultural history of Shavuot, some decorate their house and synagogues with a floral theme.

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