Just the sight of crocuses through a park railing is enough to ignite a communal sentiment of “Phew, we made it through the winter — time to store those balaclavas.”

I've always rather fancied the idea of living in a hotel. While others obsess about properties with multiple rooms, the notion of residing in just one has much more appeal. Room service, fresh towels, a Do Not Disturb sign on the door and a stream of new neighbours has to be the perfect domicile arrangement — particularly if that room is in Claridges.

During one of my recent TV interviews about the current measles outbreak in Wales, the presenter was shocked that GPs misdiagnose measles as a viral infection. This is not shocking at all for two reasons. Firstly, measles is a viral infection that initially looks like other standard viruses all our children get.

I first came to Dresden in 1985 as part of a family “restitution” visit to my father’s birthplace of West Berlin. It was before the re-unification, the “change” as they call it there, and we crossed the Berlin Wall into the German Democratic Republic at Friedrichstrasse.

Dawid Szymin was destined to run his family’s Yiddish and Hebrew publishing house in Warsaw — until he discovered photography.

In truth, he had already strayed from the path mapped out for him by his parents, having opted to study graphic arts in Leipzig and then at the Sorbonne in Paris.

When a non-Jew in prison wants to claim they are Jewish, as apparently happens “all the time”, one of the first things they do is ask for a Torah.

“They say: ‘I wanna Taawrah’,” explains Rabbi Michael Binstock, director of Jewish Prison Chaplaincy, who has been working as a prison rabbi in England and Wales for over 40 years.

The United Synagogue licenses only three firms of stone-masons to work in its cemeteries. Each has its own catalogue of headstones, but there is little to choose between them.

Online dating sucks. It’s exhausting, it’s demoralising and the people you date have invariably lied about their height. For young people it is even harder because it is still considered embarrassing to have to resort to looking for love online. This means there are many thousands of young Jews asking what are the alternatives? Here are five ways to log off and still click with someone:

If, as a respectable, suburban Jewish mother of four grown-up children, men regularly came up to you in the street and begged you to scream at them, “Go f*** yourself”, would you feel like you had made it as a international icon of Jewish womanhood?