Honored Rabbis and Rabaniyot, MK Uri Orbach, Distinguished guests:
I am happy and excited to meet with Matan's Friends.
This is the fourth time we have been privileged to host the circle of Matan's friends in our home. The growing number of participants expresses the community's feelings toward Matan.
The dinner last year celebrated Matan's Bat Mitzvah program. I shared with you the celebration of the first Bat Mitzva in the next generation of our family, for my granddaughter
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Simply put: It was wonderful. This first session, our study group consisted of 3 - Batya Medad, Esther Benovitz and me. It is expected that we will have more as some members are away and others are still undecided. We met in the Beit Midrash, so we had access to reference books and the internet. We used the study sheets as our guidelines. We expect to post some of our findings on the website.

What we learned, as well, is that 1 hour is far from enough time. We, therefore, plan to add time after
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Gila Hoch

A few weeks ago, I turned to my chavruta and asked, "Does it ever occur to you how strange it is that we wake up every morning and head off to 6-7 hours of discussion about the arba avot nezikin [four categories of damage]?" Through all my years of learning, I've never been one to feel that every moment of my learning had to be immediately relevant. Week-long discussions revolving around one Tosfot have seemed completely reasonable and necessary. Last year, while learning Masechet Beitza, although most of the discussions
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