Welcome to Mike's Jewish Pages

These pages are copies of emails sent to an email conference group whose members are all teachers. My aim was to provide basic information about the Jewish festivals in a way that would help non-Jewish colleagues who were teaching about Judaism or wanted to mention Judaism in their assemblies.

As one of the 8000 or so teachers in England who was given a laptop computer as part of the DfEE's Portables for Teachers '98 Project I have been in regular email contact with a group of around 300 of the other teachers in the project. The group goes by the name of Bectans. In December 1998 a lot of the traffic in the group centred around Christmas and there were many recommendations for Christmas-related internet sites which might provide resources or entertainment for teachers and their pupils. I decided to chip in with some recommendations of my own. Thus began Mike's Jewish Sites of the Day.

The Chanukah-related messages that I sent out then were well received and I decided to send out messages about the other major festivals as they came round. I managed most of them although Shavuot got missed because I was temporarily unsubscribed from the group at that time.

One thing that surprised me was that in searching for websites that gave information about Jewish topics so many useful ones were of Christian, rather than of Jewish, origin. Although some of the content of many of these sites would not be acceptable to many Jews there was still a lot of interesting and valuable information in them.

I cannot be sure that the websites that I recommended at the time are still operational but it can't hurt to try them, can it?