Judaica

Lag b'omer 2012

Print
PDF

Lag B’Omer is celebrated on the 33rd day after Pesach.
We are commanded in the Torah to count 7 complete weeks from the day after Passover night, ending with the festival of Shavuot on the 50th day.
The 7 week period has become a solemn time, a period of semi-mourning when weddings and other festivities are not held, music is not heard and hair is not cut.
According to the Talmud, during the time of the the great Rabbi Akiva, 24,000 of his students died from a plague because they did not show proper respect to one another.
On the 33rd day of the counting of the Omer the plague ended and therefore this day is a festive day.
The most well – known custom of Lag B’Omer is the lighting of bonfires to symbolise the bright light of the Torah as on that day Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, the author of the central work of Kabbalah revealed the light of the Torah to his students on the day he died.
Children play with bows and arrows to remind us that Jewish students who were forbidden by the Romans to study Torah carried bows and arrows to the forest as if they were going hunting when in fact they went to study secretly there.
Many 3 year olds have their first hair cuts at the Lag B’Omer celebration.

Esther Levitan.

Pupils shine candles for Holocaust victims 2012

Print
PDF

Treat everyone you meet with dignity and respect so that the Holocaust’s horrors against humanity are never allowed to happen again. This is the message Theodor Herzl High School pupils received at a special Holocaust Remembrance ceremony, marked in April annually by Israel and other Jewish communities.

Pupils lit six large and many tealight candles in tribute to the six million men, women and children who died in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. In Israel, the sound of a siren stops traffic and pedestrians for two minutes of silent devotion on ‘Yom Hashoah Ve-Hagevurah’ (translated from the Hebrew as Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day). The day was set on the Hebrew calendar in 1951, as it marks the anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. In 2005 the United Nations designated 27 January, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Respect and integrity are this year’s major ethical themes being actively applied to academic, cultural and sporting activities at Theodor Herzl High, Primary and Pre-Primary Schools. Campus Head Stephen Fay said the ceremony was also an opportunity to reinforce the importance of these values and contribute to the pupils’ development as responsible, caring citizens.

‘Holocaust’ is a word of Greek origin meaning ‘sacrifice by fire’. More than 1.5 million Jewish children and tens of thousands of other youths died under Nazi tyranny.

More Articles...