In a country where “football” means soccer, you would think the Super Bowl would be a relic of the past for U.S. émigrés. However, for many of them the annual NFL championship game is cause for a party, complete with nachos and subs.

Steve Leibowitz, president of American Football in Israel, estimates that hundreds of fans will attend dozens of Super Bowl parties in Israel as the New England Patriots and New York Giants face each other on Feb. 5 — even though kickoff translates to 1:30 in the morning Israel time.

“In the old days, I used to organize Super Bowl parties at hotels because there was no way to watch at home,” said Leibowitz, a native New Yorker. “It’s kind of like wanting to celebrate Thanksgiving — it’s a part of the culture you grew up in, that you could take part in even if you were Jewish. It’s another reason for a party, but here it’s just at a very inconvenient hour. People arrange to come late to work or school the next day.”

When the New York Giants and New England Patriots take the field for Sunday’s Super Bowl, most of the country will focus on the athletes wearing the jerseys. However, from a Jewish perspective, the story behind these football franchises comes from those wearing suits in the owner’s box.

The Giants are co-owned by the Tisch family, with film and television producer Steve Tisch, son of Bob, as the team’s chairman and executive vice president. Bob’s brother, Larry, was the father of Jim — former president of the UJA Federation of New York and former board chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Jim’s wife, Merryl, chairs the board of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty.

On the New England side, owner Robert Kraft’s wife Myra — who passed away last July — served as chair of the Boston-based Combined Jewish Philanthropies’ (CJP) board of directors and was twice co-chair of CJP’s annual fundraising campaign.

With less than a minute to play in the biggest football game of his life, Jewish punter Josh Miller wanted a sandwich.

“I was hungry,” he said in an interview, recalling one of his many thoughts from Super Bowl XXXIX, when his New England Patriots edged the Philadelphia Eagles, 24-21.

Miller played an important role in the Patriots’ third NFL championship. With time running out, he booted the ball with enough backspin that it was downed at the Eagles’ four-yard line with 46 seconds left in the game. Before such a pressure-filled moment, Miller recalled the advice of head coach Bill Belichick, long regarded as one of the NFL’s top minds.

“He called me over and said, ‘Hey, man, just catch [the snap] and get rid of it,’” Miller said.

Two years after the earthquake that devastated Haiti, medical students at Quisqueya University earlier this month took part in the island nation’s first “White Coat Ceremony,” marking the commitment of medical students there to providing compassionate, patient-based care.

This symbolic ritual for future doctors, now common at U.S. and Israeli medical schools, was introduced in 1993 by the Englewood Cliffs-based Arnold P. Gold Foundation. It has since spread to 18 countries, including Afghanistan, Japan, and now Haiti, thanks to the efforts of Tenafly resident Dr. Galit M. Sacajiu.

“Some of you may be asking yourselves, when medical school buildings and operating rooms have yet to be rebuilt and a single medical textbook is a luxury, when we have no laboratories, and so many of our brothers and sisters still live in makeshift homes, why invest in an event such as this ceremony of humanism in medicine?” asked Sacajiu, in her remarks at the Jan. 16 ceremony.

A swift and massive Jewish response followed the 7.0-magnitude earthquake on Jan. 12, 2010, that caused more than 250,000 deaths and at least as many injuries in Haiti.

The Jewish Federations of North America partnered with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to funnel millions of dollars of contributions to help in the relief work. Israel was among the first of many countries to send humanitarian aid.

The 236 military, security, rescue, and medical personnel sent by Israel’s Foreign Ministry arrived at Port-Au-Prince on two Boeing 747 jets leased from El Al by Tzahal (the hebrew acronym that stands for Israel Defense Forces, or IDF). A Tzahal field hospital was set up in a soccer field near the airport just four hours after landing on Jan. 15, the first such treatment facility to be up and running after the devastating earthquake.

With the Jewish communities of Bergen County on heightened alert, some 200 religious and community leaders gathered on Jan. 12 to discuss the recent string of anti-Semitic incidents in the county with law enforcement and government officials.

The meeting followed by one day the most recent, and most serious, attack — a firebombing that could have claimed the lives of eight people. The incident targeted the old Queen Anne building in Rutherford that houses Orthodox Congregation Beth El, as well as the home of its rabbi and his family. Five of the eight potential victims were children.

In the wake of last week’s attack on a Rutherford synagogue, social media is helping create a new sense of security there.

Adam Wolf, a West Orange resident who works in real estate, grew up in Rutherford and his parents live two blocks from Temple Beth El, the site of last week’s firebombing. When he heard about the attack, Wolf wanted to do something to help, and the result has been a viral campaign through e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter to raise money for the shul’s security upgrades.

On Monday, Rabbi Nosson Schuman went shopping with his wife to buy new sheets to replace the ones scorched by a Molotov cocktail thrown through their bedroom window just before dawn on Jan. 11.

That night, he had planned to kick off a new adult-ed class on prayer in Congregation Beth El of Rutherford, the small synagogue that shares the house where he and his family have lived since August 2009. Instead, the congregants gathered to discuss the incident, which police are still puzzling over.