Green Your Yom Kippur, and Make It Last

by Rachel Cemansky for HowStuffWorks

Celebrating Yom Kippur means a day of not eating or drinking, using electricity, running water, or driving. The Day of Atonement is a green-as-you-can-get kind of holiday, but to go the extra mile, here are a few (if obvious) ways to make the holiday even greener, and make the green lifestyle lessons last.

Tips for green ways to break fast:

1. Make it a vegetarian or vegan meal.

2. Which means skipping the lox, but if you just can't, make sure it's harvested as sustainably as possible.

3. Buy locally-made bread and if you're doing cream cheese, buy organic dairy.

4. Use petroleum-free candles, or make your own.

5. Make your own honey cake, and by all means use local honey—the bees need your help.

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While you're at it, check out our High Holidays Holiday Spotlight Kit for ideas, crafts, recipes, etc.

A Very Green Rosh Hashanah

Lisa Borden/The Blog, Huffington Post Canada

On Rosh Hashanah, we celebrate the New Year and give thanks for the creation of our world. We dedicate time to family and friends and we reflect on our past year and celebrate the start of the new year. It's the perfect time to make new goals for the year ahead and try to do better for yourself, your family, and our world.

Shopping for the holidays
Be eco-"logical" about planning your family gatherings right from the get-go. Shopping locally for an organic Rosh Hashanah meal, apples and honey will not only help support your neighbours and community, but you will also serve kind, chemical and pesticide-free food. And don't forget, shopping tools can be as important as the food itself. What a shame it is to carry home glorious food in a toxic throwaway.

Tote the right thing
Plastic bags are a thing of the past, but if you're toting a 99 cent reusable, you could be doing more harm than good. Non-woven polypropylene reusable bags are made from the same stuff as disposable plastic bags -- petroleum (ick!) and have been found to have high levels of lead. It's time to carry on (literally!). Arm yourself with a bag that will last you all of your shopping to come. Try a fair-trade bag that is lab-tested, lead-free and is washable.

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Check out Jvillage’s High Holiday+    page.  While you're at it, check out our High Holidays Holiday Kit; all kinds of great ideas for the whole family.

Hebrew Union College Going Green

Hannah Dreyfus The Jewish Week

Liz Piper-Goldberg, fifth-year rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR), has been passionate about the environment since grade school. As a teenager, she encouraged members of her community to stop using incandescent light bulbs. For Piper-Goldberg, it was like a light bulb went off — a compact fluorescent light bulb, that is.

“I realized how a simple change at the most basic level of our lives can translate into big savings for us, and for the environment,” said Piper-Goldberg, 27.

Today, she’s bringing simple, significant changes to the HUC-JIR’s New York campus. Thanks to a grant from the Gendler Grapevine Project, Piper-Goldberg helped spearhead the Greening Initiative, a project to revamp the campus’ food system in order to minimize waste. The project will launch this fall.

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From SolarEnergy.com

It stands to reason that solar panels are far more effective when they’re clear of dirt and dust that can block the sun’s energy-giving rays. But just how does one clean all those hundreds, even thousands of panels that make up the world’s largest solar power plants? After all, that’s a lot of time, manpower and cost.

Fortunately, some Israeli engineers have come up with a novel idea. Well, perhaps not so novel. After all, the Jetsons did have Rosie way back in 1962. Perhaps inspired by the Hanna-Barbera-created housemaid, engineers with Israel-based Ecoppia have created a small army of solar panel cleaning robots that provide daily, water-free, energy independent cleaning to the Ketura Sun Solar Park, making it the world’s first completely autonomously-cleaned solar energy park.

The video above shows a few of the 100 centrally controlled automatons in action, cleaning the Ketura park’s massive solar panels. Set to work at nighttime, the robots move up and down aluminum frames and use microfiber pads and controlled air flows to push dirt from the surface of the panels. During the day, they’re charged using solar energy generated by the plant. Previously, the panels, which cover a 20-acre site, were cleaned just nine times a year because it was such a laborious and expensive ordeal. Meanwhile, all that dirt and dust covering the panels between cleanings made for sub-optimal efficiency at the plant.

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How Israel’s Leading Ebola Expert Could Eradicate The Virus

And why the US military is investing in him

By: Dyana So and Maya Yarowski, NoCamels
Africa is currently facing its worst Ebola outbreak in history, with over 1,600 officially reported cases of infection, a death toll of 880 and rising, and a startling mortality rate of up to 90 percent.

One of the reasons that the Ebola virus is so deadly is that there is still no proven vaccine or treatment, and only a handful of researchers around the world are currently working on a cure. But while the World Health Organization (WHO) is busy raising $100 million for an emergency response plan, increasing numbers of people in West Africa are prone to or have already become infected with one of the most deadly and dangerous diseases.

So what’s really being done about a cure? Dr. Leslie Lobel, an Israeli researcher at Ben Gurion University and one the world’s few experts on the Ebola virus, is currently ahead of many of his international colleagues when it comes to discovering a vaccine that would make humans immune to the virus. But besides toting his own vaccine as the cure all and end all of the Ebola epidemic, Lobel has some interesting insight to impart on why this is the most serious outbreak in history.

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