At around mid-day on Thursday, The Hanassi Blog received its 5,000th page view. That’s not bad for a pretty recent blog that’s aimed at a relatively small and exclusive readership. We are of course grateful to our readers for making this new Hanassi enterprise worthwhile -- and we are even more grateful to our contributors!
For the record, we have peeped behind the blogposts and taken a look at the back pages, which have lots of juicy data about The Hanassi Blog. We have discovered, for instance, which blogposts have been most frequently accessed. Of the 127 posts we had published by Thursday morning, our "top ten" of most popular posts reads like this (if you want to read one, just click on the name):
- Jerusalem Street Art: a visual spectacular (linking to a video by Heshy Engelsberg)
- The Water-Drawing Ceremony set to music (featuring a jolly composition by Max Stern)
- Gevalt! It's Gevura (A report by Pessy Krausz on the Yom Iyun we shared with OU Israel before Chanukah, with links to recorded presentations by five speakers -- including Rabbis Wein and Kenigsberg)
- Meet Elie Samet (Elie tells us a little about his Gemara project and his fondness for our se'udah shelishit)
- Happiness in our Hall! (31 girls displaced from Shlomi, up north, come to Hanassi for their batmitzvah celebrations)
- Something to do with your Etrog (Juliette Rothschild passes on to us an etrog liqueur recipe that originated with our late member Sydney Faber a.h.)
- Strings and Things: the Ladies of Tzitzit for Tzahal come to Hanassi (Hanassi takes in Tzitzit for Tzahal)
- Chanukah in Jerusalem 2024 (this post flags another Heshy Engelsberg production number)
- Is Galut so Bad? (Rabbi Paul Bloom writes provocatively about the difficulties of overcoming the comfort of exile)
- Frogs here, frogs there. Frogs were jumping everywhere (local rabbi and eco-campaigner Jonathan Neril teaches us about the signficance of frogs in the environment and in the Torah).
Once again, thanks to everyone who has made this possible, for helping make Hanassi more than just a shul.