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In Russia, a three-day gathering of physicians and breast cancer survivors. In Hungary, a nationwide breast cancer screening program. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, a breast cancer hot line. 

Four years after the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee joined the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation in a series of pilot advocacy and educational programs in three former Iron Curtain countries, tens of thousands of women are learning to take their health, literally, into their own hands, leaders of the initiative say.

Houston — Tzipora Mintz’s first concern when her husband learned he had to come here for medical treatment in early 2003 was his health. He had lymphoma, an advanced form of the cancer of the immune system.  

Her second concern was housing. She and her husband — a young Orthodox couple from Brooklyn, they had recently had a new child — would be spending months, on and off, in Houston, while he received care at the Texas Medical Center.

During the reign of King Hussein, Jordanian currency would be printed with an empty space next to the image of a prominent site or prominent citizen. Hold the dinar up to a light, and a faint picture of the king would appear.

During the reign of King Hussein, Jordanian currency would be printed with an empty space next to the image of a prominent site or prominent citizen. Hold the dinar up to a light, and a faint picture of the king would appear.

The most memorable incident in the life of 16-year-old Oopsie took place last year in a stranger’s hospital room in Israel.

Oopsie is the non-de-plume of Zachy Adler, a yeshiva high school student from Woodmere, L.I., who, as a clown outfitted with makeup, red foam-rubber nose and floppy ears, entertains kids in hospitals and senior citizens in nursing homes in both Israel and the United States. Visiting Tel Aviv’s Tel HaShomer Hospital with a group of fellow young clowns from the New York area, he noticed a sad-looking girl sitting alone in an open room.

One of these days, probably in the dark of winter’s early evening, Rabbi Regina Sandler-Phillips, a “fast approaching 50” native of Manhattan, with a large knit kipa atop her closely cut gray hair, will walk up the front stairs of a Jewish funeral home on the edge of Borough Park.

In Mick Fine’s classroom, the sixth-graders are creating cartoons and board games and posters for their family’s upcoming seders. In the classroom of Nicole Levy and Vanessa Miller, the kindergarteners are putting the finishing touches on artworks that will be bound together into mini-Haggadot to be shared with their families next week. Throughout the classrooms of the Solomon Schechter School of Manhattan, the K-8 students are learning about the traditions of Passover in other non-traditional, hands-on ways.

At West Side Judaica, seder plates are the hot item these days. A little south, at Manhattan Judaica, a new Haggadah by the late philosophical leader of the Modern Orthodox movement is a best-seller. Further south, at J. Levine Books & Judaica, novelty items like a Pharaoh punching bag and a where-did-the-wine-go? Elijah’s Cup are popular.

In this national time of recession, in the Jewish period before Passover, business is off for many merchants – but it’s not as off as expected for businesses selling goods for Pesach.