More in ‘death’

We asked Lila, 7, Josie, 8, and Noemi, almost 5, a few questions: how do you picture God? Why does God allow evil in the world? Is God all-powerful?
You know, the little questions.
These imponderables may stump rabbis and philosophers, but children have their own ideas.

CREDIT: Justin Gabbard
A close friend of mine passed away last week. Her name was Lisa, and she had been battling cancer for some time. Her death was not unexpected, least of all by me; I expect death, even when it isn’t expected.
My son didn’t take it as well. He’s 5 years old, and he began ...

Last week, Maxie, my 5-year-old daughter, came home from school talking about the Haitian earthquake. “The houses fell on the people and they got squashed and now the children have no mommies,” she told me.
The previous week, I’d explained to Maxie and Josie, her 8-year-old sister, that there was an earthquake far away and ...

This article was originally published on August 23, 2007.
Freud said that “hysterics suffer from reminiscences,” although he didn’t have memoir-writing in mind. As I write my way back ceaselessly into the past, I wonder about all the things I only half-know and half-remember, random hysterical tics. Wasn’t I absorbing, all the time, the habits and ...

This morning, we mentioned the case of the Chicago man whose grandchildren were disinherited for marrying non-Jews. The Illinois Supreme Court ruled that dentist Max Feinberg and his wife, Erla, were within their rights when drafting wills that made marrying Jews a condition of receiving a share of their estate. Legally speaking, this seems logical. ...

• A synagogue in Maryland canceled High Holiday services because it’s down to one remaining member. “Most of our funds are donations (in memory) of people who have died. When that’s your biggest fundraiser, that’s not a good thing,” he says. [AP]
• As the cost of sending kids to Jewish day school grows, a drop ...

• Believe it or not, there is a world record for the world’s biggest custard pie fight. And, even more surprisingly, it’s just been beaten by a group called the Jewish Lads’ and Girls’ Brigade in the village of East Mersea in England. [Daily Gazette]
• The Forward’s Sarah Seltzer wants “Jewess” Rachel Menken back as ...

The National Transportation Safety Board requested the services of Misaskim, an ultra-Orthodox organization that tries to ensure that Jewish victims of disasters and violent crimes are buried in accordance with religious law, after the air crash over the Hudson River last weekend, which killed five people on a tourist helicopter and three on a private ...

The latest casualties of Jews’ oft-bemoaned failure to transmit the importance of “looking after our own” from one generation to the next: the dead. Once, according to The New York Times, American Jews, particularly in the Northeast, organized societies to oversee the care and burial of the deceased. Now the dissolution of many such groups—due, ...

The first thing that happened the morning after my brother Eric killed himself was my sister and I told our father. It was early in the morning so we let ourselves into his house where he had been living alone since our mother died five years earlier. He sat on the edge of the bed, ...