Cooking for Passover is a bit like preparing for Christmas dinner, except that it’s three Christmas dinners in a row, no bread is allowed, and the whole extended family has turned out to attend!

Schools are closed. Offices, restaurants, factories, and workplaces are locked and shuttered, their workers holed up in their homes with bated breath, waiting for the newest update, the newest mandate, the newest rule we must follow to keep ourselves safe from disease.

When I was very little, my father took me outside on the eve of the first day of Adar, the Hebrew month in which we celebrate the holiday of Purim. Evening was a deep blue bowl studded with glittering stars.

Because of Christians like you, who care about special needs children and their families who are living in Biblical Israel, Heart of Benjamin is a reality!

That first day, everything I had ever thought about farming went right out the window. I hauled heavy irrigation tubes and I hacked at spiny weeds between the neat rows of sprouting green-tipped onions.

January 21, 2020by Meira Weber The last thing we were expecting to show up on the doorstep of the CFOIC Heartland Israel Office that day was the rain-soaked and windswept Chief of Security from Har Gilo. He blew in like the storm raging outside, bursting into the office with a huge, exhilarated grin and carrying […]

  January 14, 2020By: Meira Weber In Israel, there is an endearing yet perplexing tradition of calling complete strangers “achi” – “my brother.” I used to think it was funny, like a sarcastic, ingratiating nickname someone would use when they were trying to get on another person’s good side. It took me a long time […]

I know for many who love Israel and follow the Hebraic roots of our faith, whether or not to celebrate Christmas can be a real struggle.  And I usually get some chastising notes and emails from well-meaning folks who are aghast that I allow a pagan Christmas tree in my home, when I should know better!  So I will apologize in advance if talking about Christmas or saying “Merry Christmas” is offensive to you. 

My sisters and I returned home from school on that first night of Chanukah the year we moved, myself only nine years old, ears and nose bright red from cold. Inside the house, hand-drawn decorations crowded the walls and a fire crackled merrily in the fireplace, suffusing the living room with leaping golden warmth. The […]

For the Lord comforts Zion; he comforts all her waste places and makes her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the voice of song. Isaiah 51:3