Jewish Women's Book Club

The book (originally in Hebrew and recently translated) tells of the Chassidic underground in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, with the far-reaching impact it had on other Jews. It is a non-fiction documentary that gives an uplifting view of Jewish survival and Soviet history from the inside.

Culled from the rich Jewish tradition, comes the story of Queen Esther as you never heard before.

Sorele Brownstein is a Chabad Rebbetzin who has written the true Torah story of Queen Esther, based on sources in commentary and Midrash, teachings of Chassidus, and archeological & historical findings. The impetus came after teaching a women’s class which transformed her students’ perspective of Esther from a naïve, lucky woman into the more accurate lonely and brave heroine she truly was.

When she was pregnant with her second child, Stephanie Arnold had a sudden and overwhelming premonition that she would die during the delivery. Though she tried to tell the medical team and her family what was going to happen, neither the doctors nor her loved ones gave her warnings credence. Finding no physical indications that anything was wrong, they attributed her foreboding to hormones and anxiety.
In this remarkable true story, Stephanie recounts her harrowing journey and shares her surprising spiritual discoveries: we are not alone and have more loving help than we can imagine surrounding us.

Born in Brooklyn New York, Rabbi Haber served as a chaplain in the United States Air Force in the 1970s, and, as a religious Jew, had a most extraordinary experience being stationed on an Air Force Base in Alaska. Without question, not many can claim to have had experiences of the sort recorded in this book: to serve as a rabbi “on the frozen rooftop of the world,” to transmit Judaism to those both far and near, and to uncover hidden Jewish sparks.

When her young son receives a toy train as a gift, Dorothy reacts with strange agitation. Soon she is having recurrences of an inexplicable old nightmare involving a terrible train crash. Why does it all seem so real? And why is it always the same?
Unfortunately the only clue is a small Jewish star on a golden chain.

This is a riveting account of General Ulysses S. Grant’s decision, in the middle of the Civil War, to order the expulsion of all Jews from the territory under his command, and the reverberations of that decision on Grant’s political career, on the nascent American Jewish community, and on the American political process.

"Choosing My Religion," Stephen Dubner's 1996 cover story for The New York Times Magazine, described his conversion from Catholicism to Judaism. The drama and complexity of Dubner's conversion were intensified by the author's unusual religious history: before Dubner was born, his parents had made an equal and opposite conversion from Judaism to Catholicism. Dubner's memoir, Turbulent Souls, (more recently printed with the title "Choosing My Religon") expands the story he first told in the Times essay.

The Exiles of Crocodile Island is the story of a community of children torn from their homes by the Inquisition and taken to the island of Sao Tome. The book, a fictional account based on true events, narrates their defiant struggle to keep their faith.

She was wealthy and wise; he was an ignorant servant. She gave up a vast inheritance and a privileged lifestyle to marry the poor Akiva, trading the crown of luxury for the crown of Torah. In these spell-binding pages, the story of Rachel, wife of the renowned Rabbi Akiva, is brought to life, based on the masterwork of Jewish history, Dorot Harishonim. A vibrant, appealing, and glowing novel, the reader is drawn in to an era long gone but whose spectacular holiness still touches us today. Read about the woman about whom Rabbi Akiva unequivocally declared, "Your Torah and my Torah is hers."

"The Heroic Struggle" traces the history of the arrest and subsequent release from prison for "counter-revolutionary activity" of the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn in 5687 (1927). The Rebbe staunchly endured deprivation and torture, physical and mental, in an event meant to destroy the Jewish Underground, and emerged from his ordeal miraculously alive and undaunted, his defiant stance entirely intact.