Oh I Get By With a Little Help From My Friends

Being Jewish means you're part of a community...or at least striving to be part of a community if even from a distance, whether that means a pure physical distance or a symbolic distance.

Books, literature, music can all be made part of the Jewish experience. Jewish newspapers, as well.

Here in Canada, we have a nationwide "community" newspaper called THE CANADIAN JEWISH NEWS. The newspaper features a column called "The Jewish Highway," which deals with international websites that follow a theme. For example, around Chanukah, the columnist will do bits about web sites that feature Chanukah recipes, family stories, the how-to's and why's of Chanukah, etc. Or around Pesach the spotlight might be on different web sites that offer historial aspects of Pesach, or variations of the Haggadah.

Some months ago I decided to contact the columnist and make mention of THE JEWISH CONNECTION. He said he'd keep it in mind if he ever again deals with readers' choices of web sites. The man was true to his word, and this week in the column we got this write-up:

"The Jewish Connection is the joint effort of a dozen Jewish bloggers including, Pearl, who wrote to tell me about it. On the day I peeked in the offerings were quite varied. I read an article on whether to take Jewish kids out as “Erev Halloween” was approaching. Pearl wrote about her evolving feelings about being able to dance with the Torah on Simchat Torah. And a contributor named Z told of how Simon Wiesenthal’s determination to lead a life fighting on behalf of millions of Jewish souls had changed his own life. http://ajewishsoul.blogspot.com/

If you'd like to see the rest of the article, link here.

Perhaps each of you readers of THE JEWISH CONNECTION should contact your local Jewish paper and give them the heads-up about our Jewish online drop-in center. Reading about us somewhere might just be the first step for some people to make that "Jewish Connection."