Ever since financial pressures forced Hadassah Magazine to cut back to six print issues per year, we have been doing Web editions to fill the gap between the issues that reach your mailbox. We can’t say when we will get back to printing 10 issues a year, but we are working on a more robust Web presence—with more content and interactive features—to be rolled out early in 2010. Stay tuned for further details.

Closing gaps, meanwhile, is an essential part of life, and several articles in this Web edition touch on the same theme. For example, people who live in nursing homes usually take it for granted that their days of visiting museums are behind them. But that’s no longer the case. As Rachel Schwartzberg writes in “Home for the Aged—and the Aging,” the new 5,000-square-foot Derfner Judaica Museum is located on the campus of the Hebrew Home for the Aged in New York’s Riverdale section. The museum brings the outside world—people as well as objects—to the home’s residents.

One of the most poignant gaps, and one of the oldest, is the one between friends and family who were separated by the Holocaust. But as Barbara Sofer reports in “A Site for Sore Souls,” thanks to the online database of Yad Vashem, people are still finding loved ones they thought they had lost.

One of the most yawning gaps in geopolitics concerns Iran’s nuclear program. Is there any middle ground between attacking, with unpredictable but potentially dangerous consequences, and sanctions that have little prospect of working? In “Backup Plan,” Barry Rubin writes about a partial answer, in the form of missile defense, that Israel is working on.

Norma Rosen’s commentary on the death of a young man explores the quest for spiritual answers to life’s hardest questions. Her essay shows that not every gap can be closed—but that does not stop us from trying.

—Alan M. Tigay