“We live in a generation thirsting for spirituality,” says Rabbi Yakov Nagen, an interfaith activist and author who teaches at Yeshivat Otniel. Targum Shlishi is supporting the translation into English of Rabbi Yakov Nagen’s 2013 book Awakening to a New…

“Souls of his magnitude do not come our way often. Sometimes, even now, one must brace oneself when faced with the full force of Rav Kook’s passion. The more one tries to grasp him, the more he recedes, or perhaps…

They were there: establishing Israel Interviewing people who helped found the State of Israel is the mission of the Jerusalem-based organization Toldot Yisrael, which has been engaged in a race against time since its founding in 2007. Toldot Yisrael videotapes…

The history of the Holocaust in Lithuania was effectively rewritten for decades. In a “country [that] sports street names and monuments honoring locals who collaborated with the Nazis during World War Two,” as Josh Cohen wrote on the website Defending…

What is it like to be one of the women enrolled at Yeshivat Maharat, the first yeshiva to ordain women as Orthodox clergy? “When you know that the very thing that you are doing, albeit groundbreaking or controversial, is important,…

Traveling in Europe with a friend several years ago, Sarah L. Singer had no desire to go to Venice, much less to explore the site of the Jewish Ghetto established there five hundred years ago. She certainly didn’t expect to be enchanted by her first encounter with the site, or to travel back time and again from her home in...

A Targum Shlishi grant helped support a significant archaeological research project that has garnered international attention and has been the subject of a recent NOVA documentary, Holocaust Escape Tunnel, which first aired on PBS in April 2017. The research located an escape tunnel in the Ponar forest near Vilnius, Lithuania, built by prisoners during the Holocaust, who used mainly spoons and their hands to dig...

Almost no one knows about the secret group of intellectuals that documented life in the Warsaw Ghetto and buried the documents on the eve of the uprising. Thousands of those documents were recovered in 1946 and 1950 but were largely untranslated and little known for decades, until historian Samuel Kassow’s 2007 book Who Will Write Our History? A documentary film of the same title is currently...

Exploring the Psychology of the “Lone Wolf” Terrorist An innovative and important pilot study by Dr. Irwin J. (Yitzchak) Mansdorf, Ph.D., of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs’ Institute for Contemporary Affairs delved into the psychology of the “lone wolf”…

Targum Shlishi helped support Oren Baruch Stier’s book Holocaust Icons: Symbolizing the Shoah in History and Memory (Rutgers University Press). In the book, Stier explores what he calls Holocaust icons, which are symbols that have essentially become stand-ins for the…