What 's Nu?^*

The Glossary of Jewish Terminology is constantly updated to reflect every Jewish term used in this site.

The Current Calendar is updated regularly, and contains calendars for the current three months.

August 1, 2012

I updated the Tisha B'Av page to address the notion that Tisha B'Av is connected to Kristallnacht or 9/11, and also to add the Edict of Expulsion as one of the post-biblical tragedies that occurred on Tisha B'Av.

October 6, 2011

I just corrected a glitch that caused some very common, basic searches to get no results if you used the drop-down hints. Oops! Sorry about that; I only recently noticed this problem.

August 23, 2011

I've updated the genealogy page to reflect the recent change of Footnote.com, a general American genealogy site, into Fold3.com, an American military genealogy site. I was very fond of the old version, which I subscribed to for several years, but I'm not sure how useful this new focus will be to Jewish genealogists.

August 21, 2011

Judaism 101 is now available in a mobile-friendly format! The mobile site has all of the same content as the regular site, but is designed to be easier to read and navigate on small devices like mobile phones. Every page on the original site now has a link to the corresponding mobile version, and vice versa, so you can easily switch to whatever works best for you.

In the process, I cleaned up all of the pages on the site for maximum compatibility, fixed some scripts that previously only worked in Internet Explorer, fixed any dead links to other sites, updated some outdated references, and added links to Kindle versions of suggested reading, where available. Most pages have not changed signifcantly, but a few pages have more substantial changes:

• The page on Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews has been reorganized to be less Ashkenazic-biased
• The page on Synagogues, Shuls and Temples has been updated to add more information about the organizational structure of synagogues, particularly the relationship between clergy and the lay members of the synagogue board.
• The scripts that perform the calendar calculations on The Jewish Calendar: A Closer Look were reworked to use only Javascript, no VB Script, for greater compatibility. I also changed the script to return the result to a textbox on the page instead of a pop-up, which was blocked by many browsers. The calculations also start with an earlier molad, which allows calculation of dates back to 1971, though it does make for more complicated math!

June 1, 2011

I'm working on some upgrades to the site (coming soon), and I noticed that the Jewish Genealogy page is woefully out of date due to numerous changes on the LDS Church's Family Search site. I have updated my page to reflect the current functionality of the LDS site. I have also added some discussion of the new GenTeam.at Austrian genealogy site that has a lot of valuable information for Jewish researchers.

^*For those who don't get the pun: "nu" is a Yiddish word equivalent to English words like "so?" or "well?," and can be used all by itself to mean "What's new?"

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