Last Friday, after an overnight flight from Philadelphia, we arrived to an overcast sky in Tel Aviv and by the time we reached the Jerusalem hills the skies had darkened, the rain fell, and the windows were fogged up from the heat trapped inside the bus. For those that had never been to Israel before, […]

I’ve probably taught 20 different courses over the past 11 years at Prozdor. While most have been about Israel and the Bible, every now and again I take a shot at something new. This semester I had a crazy idea: what would it be like to teach a class about how Judaism would look, feel, […]

I’m a summer movie kind of guy. I like doomsday, special effects, dramatic corny dialogue and exhilaration. Case in point: I saw “Independence Day” five times in theaters. (For those of you who are curious, it’s actually not the movie I saw the most times in theaters; that title belongs to “Indiana Jones and the […]

When a Jewish kid from Boston met a Catholic girl from Rhode Island in a Waltham basement fifteen years ago, I’m sure no one looked into the future and saw us happily married with a boatload of kids. But in this world, you never know what will happen, and here we are. It may not […]

When I was little, I was notoriously impatient and notoriously meticulous. I would look at older kids and want to be older. I would count down the days until vacations or camp with anticipation and diligence. I would follow the train schedule stop-by-stop on the way from Boston to Washington seeing how many minutes late […]

Growing up in Belmont, I knew about Bedford in two distinct ways. First, that the Marshall’s in Bedford was the best one around. Second, that Bedford was on the way out to “The Swamp,” which is what my parents called Great Meadows. That was about it. Now that I’ve been a homeowner and resident in […]

New England in mid-March is a mishmash of gray and mud; it’s not the prettiest landscape. I daresay that snow cover is somewhat more attractive, but as we get ready for spring, mud will have to do. As the earth awakens and begins to yield its fruit, and the crocuses wait for the first warm-ish […]

Ilana Pavlotsky is a junior at Needham High School and recently returned from traveling to Ukraine on Havayah, a fellowship run by Prozdor for teens from Boston, Haifa, and Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, to run 10 days of programming for Jewish elementary school students there. Ilana, who comes from a Ukrainian family herself, is a passionate ballroom dancer […]

For the fourth year in a row I spent a sleepless Shabbat in Jerusalem. It’s not necessarily Jerusalem’s fault that I’m up until 3 in the morning every time I’m there. Given the timing of Prozdor’s vacations and flights, inevitably we arrive late on a Wednesday or Thursday, eat dinner, and then stumble off to […]

By this point in my life, I’m certainly old enough to realize what I’m good at. I’ve also reached the point that I recognize what needs a lot of work. Case in point: writing. Don’t get me wrong, I love to write. I enjoy blogging, I’ve been keeping a daily journal for 25 years and […]