Halloween… time to bake the challah. Keren Engelberg, a contributing writer for The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, reports that some scholars suspect the Sabbath bread got its twists in pagan times, when Northern European women offered special braided loaves up to the Teutonic goddess Berchta (madonna / whore). It’s not exactly news that most major traditions have some pagan roots, but Engelberg is reporting on a more contemporary phenomenon — Jewish witches. Melissa Oringer describes this braiding of unlikely faiths onJewitchery, and Margot Adler, a longtime NPR journalist, chronicles her practice in a column for Beliefnet. Engelberg’s feature story for The Jewish Journal parrots some of the more mainstream PC chatter on paganism, but she gathers enough talking heads of different persuasions to make for a real debate on the old one God / many gods debate. P.S. For most pagans, today isn’t Halloween, it’s Samhain.