When Sara (Gerstenfeld) Strobel, founder of the girls’ performance program Ratzon, was growing up, large groups of unaffiliated Jews often experienced Shabbos for the first time at the Gerstenfeld home. Sara describes her musically talented family to be “an under the radar family of creative and giving parents.” She adds, “Growing up in my parents’ home showed me that there is something in everyone I can appreciate and that created a larger openness in me to all kinds of people.” It was this home that inspired Sara to identify community needs and attend to them, leading to her latest endeavor, Elevate, a new organization for women.

Autism is a challenging – and more and more frequently diagnosed – condition. In fact, as of 2018, the CDC estimates its prevalence as 1 in 44 children. While we might think of a child with autism as being non-verbal and exhibiting hand flapping and other odd behaviors, he could also look like any other child yet be struggling with many life skills. Children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, or ASD, differ widely. What they have in common are deficits in communication and social interaction, and 2) restricted, repetitive behaviors, interests, or activities.

School is the place we go to learn, and students about to begin the new school year will soon be faced with the difficult task of learning – that is, trying to incorporate new information and concepts into their brains (their protests notwithstanding). In doing so, they will be engaging in both surface and deep learning.

Thirty years ago, I started teaching at Bais Yaakov of Baltimore, and 30 years ago, Miriam Stark Zakon wrote the short story, “Reb Aharon in Search of a Miracle,” published in Sarah Shapiro’s Our Lives Vol. 1 and Artscroll’s Jerusalem Gems. And for most of these past 30 years, I have read this magical story to my students on the last day of school before Pesach vacation. It has become a tradition. Younger sisters hear about it from their older sisters. The Bais Yaakov experience is not complete without it.

Some 2,700 years ago, we went to sleep one night in a world defined by a land, its Temple, and its three levels of society: Kohanim, Leviim, and Yisraelim. We woke up the next day in grief. Our Jewish identity had been flung into the air and fallen to the ground, shattered. A Jew who had always defined himself as a Kohen or Levi had no land, no Temple, no tasks to perform. Yisraelim had no tithes to give and no opportunity for taharah, purification. As we marched into Babylon, it seemed that our entire way of life was lost.

At the same time, however, seeds had been planted to rectify this tragedy. Years before, our scholars were the first Jews to be exiled, and the institutions of learning they established had blossomed miraculously. When the rest of our nation arrived in Babylon, an infrastructure for Jewish survival was already in place. We call this era the Babylonian Exile, a brief period of 70 years that included the reign of Persia and Media. As the massive Babylonian Empire fell, Persia became a world power, controlling 127 kingdoms. And when the Persian Empire fell, in turn, those Jews who, sadly, had not returned to Israel to build the Second Temple lived in the tiny piece of the fallen Persian Empire that remained: what we today call Iran. Today’s Iranian Jews are thus Babylonian Jews whose exile began 2,700 years ago. In fact, R’ Daniel Golfeiz explains, it is inaccurate to term Persian Jews Sephardim because their exile never included a stay in Spain (Sepharad). The proper term is Edut HaMizrach (the Congregation of the East).

Do you feel heavy and bloated after the Shabbos challah? Does challah give you stomach cramps? Or, perhaps you sneeze several times after eating it, or start to itch. Any of these symptoms and others – one website on Non-Celiac Glucose Sensitivity (NCGS) listed over 50 common reactions to gluten when I first was diagnosed – may be caused by this component in wheat, barley, rye, and spelt that allows these grains to bind together as a flour. I discovered my intolerance when I developed chronic sinusitis. Determined to banish my ever-present froggy voice, I made an appointment with an allergist. After two hours of testing for airborne and food allergies as a trigger for my congestion, absolutely nothing showed up. “So strange,” I said to the doctor, “because I only use spelt, and even a three-day Yom Tov dose of that gives me stomachaches and increased congestion.”