Israel Active

The Aliya to Israel of some of the 100 million plus Bnei Anusim (descendants of Sephardi Jews forced to convert to Christianity) could be larger than the return of the “lost tribe” of Ethiopian Jews. Many are discovering their Jewish roots and connecting with Israel.

The Feast of Tabernacles attracts huge numbers of Christian pilgrims who fulfil the Biblical command that all nations should go up to Jerusalem to celebrate the festival. This year the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem brought numerous foreign government officials to Israel, along with 5,000 Christian pilgrims.

Archeologists have been excavating the site for the new campus of Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. In the remains of the wall surrounding Jerusalem, they found weapons and scores of sling stones that the Romans fired from catapults 2000 years ago.

In two separate incidents in the Israeli city of Elad, two children fell from windows in their houses and were saved by the sukkahs (Tabernacles – ritual booths) that their neighbors had built in the apartment below.

Thanks for sending this report on the scenes in Jerusalem during Succot (Tabernacles) but especially for the picture of a sukkah (tabernacle / booth) on a camel.

I wrote previously that Csanad Szegedi, former, vice-president of Hungary’s anti-Semitic Jobbik party, discovered he was Jewish, abandoned Jobbik and visited Israel. He is now making Aliya.

They may be “temporary” dwellings, but these sukkot are something special. President Rivlin’s, Waldorf Astoria Jerusalem, Inbal Jerusalem, Kibbutz Lotan, Kibbutz Tirat Zvi, Aish HaTorah Jerusalem, Tel Aviv municipality, Samaritan community and Holon municipality.

Melanie Lidman, from the Times of Israel Lulav and Etrog African Delivery Service, tried to take a selfie, holding the four species at the Giraffe Center near Nairobi, Kenya. As she was grinning into the camera and handing out food pellets, a giraffe deftly plucked out the myrtle and willow branches.

This IDF commander knows what the Jewish festival of Succot means.

The text of a burnt scroll unearthed in 1970 in Ein Gedi by the Dead Sea has now been deciphered by researchers in Kentucky and Jerusalem using high resolution 3D scanning.  Without unwrapping, the scroll contains the Torah book Leviticus – its text unchanged for at least 1500 years.