Imabima has hosted Haveil Havalim, the News and Politics Edition: Jewish blogosphere posts about President Obama’s speech, the shooting at the Holocaust museum and more.
JPIX, the Jewish photo bloggers carnival, will appear on this blog on June 28. Submit your photo post by June 25 using this link.
Thanks to these bloggers who have submitted:
Update: Thank you for your recently submitted pics:
Still plenty of time to send in your pics.
Note: this is the first of in series of those who take my link challenge. I was going to do a more light-hearted post for the first one, but I got news that my friend Rick Black’s father died on Sunday. So this one is for G6 and Rick Black.
G6 writes eloquently about how she felt when she lost her father:
I remember vividly walking home from the hospital in utter desolation after his petirah, feeling like my world was so very dark, that I would never learn another thing ever again — how would I smile and laugh again?
How I wish somebody could have come up to me at that very moment and taken me by my shoulders, looked in to my eyes and said….. “SEVEN YEARS FROM THIS VERY DAY you will be sitting at your Shabbos table, surrounded by your entire family, which will include a new son in law, a new daughter in law and you will be cradling your brand new granddaughter in your arms on her very first Shabbos, as everyone at the table sings zemiros and learns in your father’s memory. Your granddaughter will be given her Jewish name on this very day seven years from now.
Please leave comments for her on her post. So beautiful how she savors her father’s memory and connects it to her current family joy.
*petirah = death
• • •
Rick Black interviewed his father over the past two years. An excerpt from those interviews is on the Jewish Writing Project blog, spoken in his father’s voice:
I was bar mitzvahed in a very small shul – the one on Lake Street. We didn’t make much of it. It was just a small bar mitzvah for our family. I davaned Saturday morning for the service, Shacharis and Musaf, and when they took the Torah out of the ark, I had to sing the “Shema” and my voice broke, and a kid from Hebrew school said, “You alright?”
Another piece of the interview, where Rick’s father befriends Max the Russian:
So, this fella’s name was Max Bregoff and I met him. He was a tough Russian. I introduced him to a lot of my friends who were members of the club and we made him a member of the club, too. We called him the mad Russian. He used to get very angry. He’d spit at them. He was a tough hombre but he found the American way and he was able to live a good life and enjoy himself. He spent a lot of time at the Jewish Center. Yes, he did find the American way and he became a friend.
Read Growing Up Jewish, an interview of David Black by his son Rick Black.
Rick, may you be comforted among the mourners of Israel; may we all know simchas (happy occasions) like the one G6 describes, of a happy, healthy family singing and enjoying together.
Additional Note: I spoke to a friend (not Jewish) here in Highland Park who asked questions about making a shiva call. Topic for another time, explaining a shiva call – do’s and don’ts, the halachot (laws) and the customs. If anyone has suggestions for explaining a shiva call, please feel free to comment. I told my friend that the mourner is supposed to do the talking; the mourner should take the lead in the topic of conversation.
Do ever check your blog statistics and say, huh? That’s what people searched for and found my blog?
One of the most common search terms on my blog seems to be dogwood. OK, so at one point I took a couple of great shots of my neighbor’s dogwood tree in bloom. But that’s the most common search term? Another highly ranked search term is hawthorn tree. I’ll have to accept that one; I did spend a fair amount of time photographing and researching the lovely red berry tree I found around the corner until I was informed it was a hawthorn.
Do you want a little more control over your best keyword, your best link? Here’s an idea that may or may not work.
In the comments, post your favorite link on your blog. Or your favorite link on my blog. Or on your friend’s blog. (You have my permission to post more than one link – but three would be spamming – just to set limits to this little game).
Alternatively,
list 3 keywords that you actually searched for in Google (or some other search engine).
Or do both the link challenge and the keyword challenge.
Next week, I will craft a post (or two or three) that includes a few of those posts. I will then write up some descriptions that have keywords that are in those posts. It will be interesting to watch one stats to see if this has any effect. Of course, if others do the same (if you take three of the posts people liked and write up a post about those posts, including keywords in your title tag and your description), we may see better results. If you do decide to write a post to emphasize certain keywords, please use those keywords in the title tag. Title tags are one of the most important sections in a post that search engines use to determine relevance and ranking.
Regarding the three keywords that you used to search in Google, it would be fun to craft a post based on those keywords. A bit like paper bag dramatics, no?
Since I don’t have to craft a full post (I would love to write a tech, business or even a recipe), I present an iris and these “postalinas” (mini one sentence posts):
Which of these postalinas have meaning for you? Do you like the term ‘postalina’?
Passover has been, well, a bit of a distraction for me. And blogging seems to have fallen to low priority, after cooking, sleeping, working, entertaining my daughter, washing dishes, baking potato kugel with my eldest son, brownies with my middle son, a nut jam cake with my daughter after she found out I already made a sponge cake without her.
So here is a list of what I might blog about in the future, maybe:
If I am organized enough, maybe I will post about Spring in New York City before 7 pm this evening. In case I don’t make it to that post, enjoy the rest of Pesach if you are celebrating. Everyone, take a few minutes to note any signs of spring in your neighborhood. If you are living in Australia and you happen to read this post, feel free to share signs of autumn.
Hannah Katsman (aka Mom in Israel) is a guest on Graham Gudgin’s An Englishman in New Jersey:
Above is one more sky photo taken on Raritan Avenue.
Links to explore:
Finally, the secret ingredient in the birthday cake was: BEETS. Congrats to the ones who guessed correctly (Ilana-Davita and Klara).
First, thank you to Babysitter for including the above image of stars in her post on Lech-Lecha.
ck at Jewlicious did a marvelous job of Haveil Havalim #190: Post Election Panic.
Hadassah Sabo premiered the Yiddishe Mama Blog Carnival.
Juggling Frogs posted the overdue Carnival of Overdue Thanks.
I would like to get back to a link Ilana-Davita posted last week on health. I’m taking one quote off the article from the doctor who beat cancer:
Along with fried foods and sugar, one of the book’s other targets is margarine, which he describes unequivocally as “a lot more dangerous than butter” for its role in cardio-vascular disease and obesity. He refers to the “Israeli paradox”, in which Israelis have among the lowest cholesterol levels in Western countries, “combined with one of the highest rates of cardiac infarction and obesity”. The cause, he explains, is the kashrut imperative to separate milk and meat, which has led to the use of margarines as a substitute for butter.
And thank you to those who reminded me that it is Armistice Day. We Americans call it Veterans Day. In any case, thank a veteran today.
Some of you like new places to visit, so here are four:
Mimi left me a note for my stuffed nose (I haven’t tried this yet, but I’ve got sage growing outside my kitchen):
For your stuffed nose, try making a steam tent out of a towel and a bowl of steaming sage tea. About 1 Tblsp. of sage to 2 cups of boiling water. Simmer the sage for 10 minutes and bring it to a table. Lean over the pot or bowl with the hot sage tea in it. Drape a towel over your head and the bowl. Try to stay in for 5 minutes. Your stuffed nose will start clearing up right away.
And FYI, the homeopathic remedy that my father bought for me from our local chiropractor Dr. Harry Schick (I highly recommend him, especially for allergies) is called “Flu Immune”, by Net Remedies©. It’s either a coincidence, or it worked, because I’m breathing a lot better tonight.
Batya has cooked up a delicious post-shemitta kosher cooking carnival.
More about the restaurant: and we didn’t even order the steak, and the prices were still astronomical. $18 for a hamburger that included an Israeli salad that my kids had no interest in eating. How much tomatoes/cucumbers can one mother eat?