There a ton of music and film festivals happening right now in Israel - as well as new Jewish documentaries available online as well. Here is a list of some of the highlights for you from your Israel tour guide! The Oud Festival - November 19-28 The oud is Middle Eastern string instrument and Jerusalem has held an international festival celebrating it for two decades. Due to COVID-19 it will not be happening in person. While this means that only local performers will be hig

Over the course of two days at the end of September 1941, in a ravine known as Babyn Yar (Babi Yar) below the Ukranian city of Kyiv (Kiev), Germans and Ukranians shot and killed 33,771 Jews, mostly women, children and elderly. Over the course of the next two years, 70,000 more people (Jews and non-Jews alike) were murdered there. The Nazis, later trying to hide their crimes, exhumed and burned the bodies. Later, in the name of "national unity," the Soviets filled in the ravi

Just months prior to WWII breaking out in Europe, the British White Paper of 1939 limited immigration to 15,000 a year [in contradiction of the terms of their mandate], right at the time that the Jewish people's most dire hour. Jews who had been coming before the war were placed in a detention camp called Atlit near Haifa (as a tour guide of Israel, I can attest that it is quite an interesting place to visit). After the Holocaust, when the numbers of Jewish refugees swelle

There are only 400,000 survivors of the Holocaust left alive today. These are the only people who can provide the pages of testimony that Yad Vashem requires to be able to document what happened - and to whom. When I started studying to be an Israel tour guide, we were only able to document some 3-3.5 million victims. As Soviet archives opened up - and survivors opened up about their stories before the passed on - Yad Vashem has been able to increase that number today to

After years of asserting that the Pope, who remained silent during the Holocaust, was actually working behind-the-scenes to help Jews during the Holocaust, the Vatican finally opened its archives in March to researchers. As a tour guide of Israel, I often bring up this situation while touring Yad Vashem. And finally, we have some answers. The first results of that search have come to light (keeping in mind the fact that due to coronavirus, many researchers have yet to arri