Gary Rosenblatt

Anne Frank, the Dutch teenager who through the power and intimacy of her diary became the best-known of the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust, is most often recalled for an entry that reads: “... I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart ... that this cruelty, too, shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more.”

Just before my mother, Rebbetzin Esther Friedlander Rosenblatt, was to return home to Annapolis, Md., at the end of the recent Sukkot holiday, after spending a family-filled week with us, my daughter took her aside. She told Mom that the baby she was expecting any day was a boy, and that she and her husband planned to name him for my late father.

My mother was thrilled and eagerly awaited returning to the New York area for the brit milah. She had suffered tragedy in her life and she relished every opportunity to celebrate joyful occasions.

Before there was a Jewish People, there was a Jewish family, and what a family it was.

It started with Abraham, who had marital strife caused by a jealous wife, parenting problems because his sons didn’t get along and he favored one over the other, and issues with his nephew Lot, who got in with a bad crowd in Sodom and Gomorrah.

The Orthodox Union is set to name Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, a widely respected Baltimore spiritual leader, Torah scholar and psychotherapist, as its top professional next week, according to several sources.

Jerusalem — How do you explain to an American Jew who hasn’t visited Israel how safe one feels being there? Or that many Israelis really do enjoy their lives, despite the constant tensions they live with every day?

And how do you make an Israeli who has not spent much time abroad understand what “Jewish identity” means to an American Jew? It’s an alien concept to large numbers of people in the Jewish state who have no need to parse the Jewish and Israeli aspects of their DNA, and see themselves simply as Israelis.

One of the frustrations Israelis feel about the recently released Winograd Commission report is that it was too general in its stinging criticism of the Israeli government and army in their conduct of the 2006 war with Hezbollah. By blaming everyone — from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his cabinet to the commanders of the Israel Defense Forces — in a sense, it allowed everyone to remain blameless. Or more practically, it allowed each of the key figures to explain away his own actions and cast responsibility on someone else.