Turning Israelis From Voyeurs To Congregants

Orli Santo for The Jewish Week

Programs to lure Israeli-Americans to synagogue are popping up, but it’s a slow road to shul membership.

Is it really happening? Are Israeli-Americans, the longtime refuseniks of Jewish-American institutional life, finally coming to shul?

The answer today is yes, at least in the physical sense.

For several years now, some synagogues around New York have been independently hiring Israeli directors to develop the kind of Hebrew-centric, culturally relevant programming that would lure Israeli-Americans. Their efforts have been hugely amplified by the work of the juggernaut Israeli-American organization IAC (Israeli American Council), which for the past two years has been conducting its own programs in partnership with synagogues, with the specific aim of getting Israelis to physically walk into the building. It’s safe to say that today most Israeli-American cultural life, from kids’ activities in Hebrew to holiday parties, takes place inside synagogues. So you can lead an Israeli to shul, it seems — but can you make him drink?

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Maybe We Should Give Up On Tolerance…

By Rabbi Alana Suskin for MyJewishLearning.com    

A few years ago, an acquaintance of mine — another rabbi, who is a friend of my current havruta [Jewish study partner] — was sitting with us at lunch, and astonishedly mused, “How is it possible that you two have been havrutas for over a decade?”

He shook his head at us, since he considers me the leftist of lefties, and considers my havruta, as he often says, “to the right of Attila the Hun!”

I just laughed at him.

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The Crazy Ritual We Did to Our Newborn Son

Rabbi Ilana Garber for Kveller

It was the morning of my eldest son’s bris, on the eighth day of his life. As he is my first child, it was also my eighth day of motherhood. I was sore, exhausted, and overwhelmed. Family and friends were coming in from all over and I was expected to put on a dress, come to synagogue, and smile as my child endured a strange and ancient custom, one that I supported but still made me cringe.

I am sure that the experience was more painful for me than for him. But when I look back on his early days, that Jewish ceremony is not the strangest thing that happened to my newborn son.

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Rukhl Schaechter Leads ‘Forverts’ Into the Digital Age

By Rose Kaplan for Table

As the new editor of the 119-year-old Yiddish newspaper, Rukhl Schaechter looks to connect with a broader readership

In 1998, Rukhl Schaechter was working as a Yiddish teacher at a Jewish day school in Riverdale, in the Bronx, when she got a call from Boris Sandler, the new editor of The Yiddish Daily Forward, or Forverts. Mordechai Strigler, the editor of Forverts since 1987, had died suddenly from a brain injury after a fall and the paper wanted to hire Schaechter as a new reporter. “Boris said he was looking for frishe koykhes—fresh, young blood” said Schaecter, who comes from a family of Yiddishists.

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Divers find huge trove of statues, coins in 1,600-year-old shipwreck

By Stuart Winer for The Times of Israel

In ‘biggest find in 30 years,’ archaeologists rescue rare bronze figures of gods, animals, that sank off Caesarea along with ship carrying metal for recycling

Two recreational divers discovered a 1,600 year-old shipwreck on the seabed off the coast of Israel, leading to a salvage operation which uncovered one of the largest caches of marine artifacts ever found, antiquities officials revealed Monday.

The hoard was discovered off the coast of Caesarea, a major Roman-era seaport, sometime last month, the Israel Antiques Authority said in a statement, calling the find the most extensive underwater discovery in 30 years.

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In India, with the Lost Tribe of Ephraim

by Rabbi Keith Flaks for aish.com

We transcended barriers through the power of music and prayer.

 

This Passover my wife and I went to Southern India to visit the "lost tribe of Ephraim."

This clan of about 150 claims to be descendants of the lost tribes of Israel. They practice Jewish traditions, celebrate most of the holidays, and have started to observe many mitzvot, often in their unique style.

For example, in their tradition, on Erev Pesach they actually slaughter a goat and put the blood on their doorposts! They were shocked to discover that the Jewish world doesn't do that. In general they were thrilled to learn more about how "mainstream Judaism" is being practiced in the rest of the world. Many dream of a day when they could move to the holy land of Israel.

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With All of Your Heart

By Rabbi Sharon G. Forman for ReformJudaism.org

The mezuzot (plural of mezuzah) snuggle next to one another in a ceramic bowl like a litter of newborn puppies seeking each other’s warmth. Peeking out from painted purple butterflies, the golden crown of a Hebrew letter shin reflects a ray of thin February light bouncing off its companion’s metal covering. Shards of the blue glass my husband stepped on at our wedding sparkle in a test tube inside the twisting copper of another family artifact – a mezuzah designed especially for wedding couples. An elephant trunk on my sons’ Noah’s ark mezuzah has broken in half, releasing the intact parchment scroll bearing 22 perfectly copied lines from the Book of Deuteronomy.

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Jewish Customs in Judith

By Tal Ilan, bibleodyssey.org

The book of Judith was composed sometime after the Hebrew Bible was completed. It came into being, however, considerably earlier than the books that canonized rabbinic law (the Mishnah and the Talmud). Thus, Jewish customs recorded in Judith were influenced by the Hebrew Bible and reflect an earlier Judaism than that practiced today. The Jewish customs in Judith relate to fasting, widowhood, kosher food, immersion, conversion, and slavery.

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Honor Thy Mother and Father

By Adam Kirsch for Tablet Magazine

Literary critic Adam Kirsch is reading a page of Talmud a day, along with Jews around the world.

Why do Jews wear kippot? For men, the habit of covering their heads—when studying, eating, and praying, or else all the time, depending on their level of observance—is such a basic feature of Judaism that it seems like it must go back to the very beginning of the faith. Yet the fact is that covering one’s head is not mentioned at all in the Bible. The custom originates much later, in the Talmud, and even there it is not actually a law. It was in this week’s Daf Yomi reading, in Kiddushin 31a, that the origin of the kippa appeared: “Rav Huna, son of Rav Yehoshua, would not walk four cubits with an uncovered head. He said: The Divine Presence is above my head.” For Rav Huna, always keeping his head covered appears to have been an act of exceptional piety, or else the Talmud wouldn’t bother recording it. But it eventually became standard, and now Jews follow Rav Huna’s example.

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Yiddish Flavor

In ‘Rhapsody in Schmaltz,’ Michael Wex delves into Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine and the stories behind classic dishes—from kugel to cholent to brain latkes. (Yes, brain latkes.)

By Leah Koenig for Tablet Magazine

Michael Wex is not a chef. He’s not a lifelong challah baker, an avid cookbook collector, or even, by his own admission, much of a home cook. But his new book, Rhapsody in Schmaltz: Yiddish Food and Why We Can’t Stop Eating It, might just be the most important Jewish food book published this year.

As a novelist and author of Born to Kvetch, a New York Times best-selling book on Yiddish language and culture, Wex has established himself as one of the field’s few public intellectuals—the Malcolm Gladwell of the Yiddish world, minus the controversy. In Rhapsody in Schmaltz, he turns his attention to food, specifically the nostalgic brand of cooking served forth from the hardscrabble kitchens of Eastern Europe.

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Making Grandma’s charoset (or how I learned to love Passover)

By Edgar M. Bronfman for JTA

When I walked into the house through the back door one day as a young man, I was shocked to see my mother in the kitchen. To put it mildly, this was not one of her favorite places. When I asked her why she was there, a look of panic crossed her face.

“Now that Grandma’s gone,” she explained, “I have to make the charoset.”

Sensing her culinary discomfort, I volunteered to take over.

With a look of vast relief, she fled the scene. Guided by the memory of my grandmother’s charoset — the sweet, chunky, fruity mixture that symbolizes the mortar used by the Hebrew slaves to build Egypt’s real estate — I chopped up apples and walnuts and added raisins.

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Why Bashing the Halakhic Prenup Destroys More Than It Builds

by Keshet Starr and Rabbi Jeremy Stern for The Jewish Daily Forward   

Any suggestion to help resolve the plight of agunot , or “chained women,” whose husbands won’t grant them a religious divorce, must be taken seriously. So we read Shayna Zamkanei’s article with great interest.

Zamkanei argues that the Halakhic Prenuptial Agreement (also known as “the Prenup”) does not work and she proposes what she sees as a real solution to the agunah crisis. She is wrong on both counts. Fortunately, while her proposed solution fails, the Prenup does not.

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Passover is coming soon, check out our Passover Holiday Spotlight Kit

Why there are Muslim ghettos in Belgium, but not in the US

By Jeff Jacoby, The Boston Globe
LONG BEFORE TUESDAY’S terror attacks in Brussels, it was clear that Belgium had become a breeding ground for Islamist extremists. Hundreds of Belgian Muslims — as many as 500, according to one estimate — have gone to Syria and Iraq to fight for ISIS, making Belgium by far Europe’s leading supplier of foreign jihadists. Last November’s horrific slaughter in Paris was masterminded by a Belgian radical, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, and at least four of the men who carried out those attacks were from the Brussels district of Molenbeek. One of them was Salah Abdeslam, who was captured in Molenbeek, after an intense manhunt, on March 19.

For Islamist imams and terrorist ringleaders, such neighborhoods — heavily Muslim, densely populated, with high unemployment and crime rates — have proved fertile territory for recruiting violent jihadists. “There is almost always a link with Molenbeek. That’s a gigantic problem, of course,” Belgium’s prime minister said after the Paris atrocities.

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Jewish Mourning Rituals: An Overview

From G-dcast.com

The death of a loved one is a very disorienting time, and isn’t something many people think about until it’s actually happening to them. Understanding some of the traditions and the structured periods of mourning that Judaism offers may help provide some support in the grieving process.

Here are a few translations of the words used in the video:

“Aninut” (“אנינות”, meaning “deep sorrow”) - The period from the time of death until the funeral.

“Kriah” (“קְרִיעָה”, meaning “tearing”) - After hearing about a death, immediate family members may tear a piece of their clothing or tear a ribbon provided at the funeral.


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The last of Iowa's small-town synagogues: seven members still praying

Ottumwa’s synagogue was once standing room only on high holidays but now is facing closure in what’s become a common occurence in Iowa and the midwest

Ryan Schuessler for The Guardian

Nobody can remember Ottumwa’s last bar or bat mitzvah.

The consensus between B’nai Jacob Synagogue’s few remaining members is that it would have been 15 years ago, at least. Probably 20. They can, however, remember the last funeral – and the few before.

“Obviously, we’re relatively few people, and we’re not getting any younger,” said Harvey Disenhouse, the de facto rabbi. “I would like to keep the synagogue open as long as possible, but I realize that in 10 years it probably won’t exist here.”

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Communist Jew + Muslim Indian = Affordable Health Care

By Abby Sher for Jewniverse

Q: What do you get when a Muslim Indian and a Communist Jew walk into a bar?

A: An extraordinary leader named Dr. Yusuf K Hamied.

As Drs. Kenneth X Robbins and John Mcleod explain in a fascinating recent article, Hamied is the visionary behind India’s pharmaceutical giant CIPLA – Chemical, Industrial and Pharmaceutical Laboratories – bringing generic life-saving drugs to people all over the world at more affordable prices. (Think antiretroviral cocktails for HIV patients at $1 per day.)

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Shabbat with the Iranian Jews of Tehran

JewishOnline News Exclusive

Annika Hernroth-Rothstein is moved and humbled by her visit to a synagogue in the Iranian capital Tehran, where thousands of Jews still live and pray

    “Hisna’ari me’afar kumi liv’shi big-dei sif-artech ami al yad ben Yishai beis halach’mi korvah el nafshi ge-oloh…”

By the fourth stanza of Lecha Dodi, I can feel the tears streaming down my face, and I quietly surrender to the moment. The woman next to me puts a heavy hand of comfort on my shoulder and we exchange a smile that is equal parts exploration and familiarity.

The century-old Abrishami synagogue is located on the second floor of an unassuming grey building in Palestine Street in north Tehran.

The top floor houses a busy yeshiva and in the basement there is a ballroom-style kosher restaurant often used for the community’s many weddings and barmitzvahs.

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From Groucho Marx to Seinfeld, Jewish jokes dominate top 100 list

By Ben Sales for JTA

New York magazine’s culture section, Vulture, this week published a mega-listicle, “The 100 Jokes That Shaped Modern Comedy.” With the help of comedians and historians of comedy, the magazine’s editors compiled the most important jokes ever uttered — from Charlie Chaplin making dinner rolls dance to Louis C.K. dissing his daughter.

And Jews dominate the list.

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Why Playing Chess Is Like Studying the Talmud

Halacha as the Art of Playing Chess – Divine Insanity

By Nathan Lopes Cardozo

There is probably no game as difficult and captivating as chess. Millions of people break their heads over strategies to win this game and spend years learning its ins and outs. It holds them captive as nothing else does. They dream about it and discuss the move of one single pawn as if their lives depend on it. They will follow the most famous chess tournaments and discuss every move of a world champion for days and even years. They replay famous, mind-boggling games of the past, even those that took place as far back as 70 years ago. These chess aficionados try to improve on those games of the distant past, often getting into heated arguments about a brilliant or foolish move that took place 50 years earlier. Thousands of books and tens of thousands of essays have been published on how to improve at playing the game. The rules are set up in the World Chess Federation’s FIDE Handbook. Strategies are developed and tactics suggested; countless combinations have been tried to the point that some typical patterns have their own names, such as “Boden’s Mate” and “Lasker’s Combination”. Mikhail Botvinnik revolutionized the opening theory, which was considered nothing less than a Copernican breakthrough. Famous chess studies, such as the one published by Richard Reti (1921), are revelations of tremendous depth. (He depicted a situation in which it seems impossible for the white king to catch the advanced black pawn while the white pawn can be easily stopped by the black king.)

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China's Search for the Secrets of Jewish Success

In their quest to understand Jews better, popular Chinese authors and bloggers offer up facts and myths about everything from the Talmud to anti-Semitism

By James Ross for Tablet Magazine   

During my first trip to China in the summer of 1985, I visited English Corner in People’s Park in Shanghai one Sunday afternoon. It’s one of the places where young Chinese people used to practice their English with visiting foreigners. Officials from the university where I was teaching in Shanghai escorted me there, and a big crowd quickly gathered to talk with me—a tall, curly-haired foreigner—and pushed closer to shower me with questions.

Some of the questions seemed strange to me (“Do all Americans have AIDS?”) but most were routine, such as, “Where are you from? How do you like China? Are you married? Do you like Chinese girls?” After two months in China, none of this was surprising to me except for one additional question: “What is your religion?”

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1,700-Year-Old Galilee Inscriptions Refer to ‘Rabbis,’ Affirm Jewish Presence

From the algemeiner.com

JNS.org – Three 1,700-year-old funerary inscriptions referring to “rabbis” were discovered in Moshav Zippori in Israel’s Galilee region, a finding that affirms a Jewish presence in Israel during the Roman period, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) announced Wednesday.

“The importance of the epitaphs lies in the fact that they reflect the everyday life of the Jews of Zippori and their cultural world,” said Dr. Motti Aviam of the Kinneret Institute for Galilean Archaeology, which partnered with the IAA on the discovery.

Two of the Aramaic inscriptions were found buried in a cemetery in Zippori, but their names have not yet been deciphered. One of the inscriptions bears the name “The Tiberian,” Aviam said.

“This is already the second instance of someone from Tiberias being buried in the cemetery at Zippori,” said Aviam. “It is quite possible that Jews from various parts of Galilee were brought to Zippori to be buried in the wake of the important activity carried out there by [the Mishnah-era sage] Rabbi Yehuda Ha-Nasi.”

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Meet the Bal Ej, Ethiopia’s Other Jews

By Ilana Sichel for Jewniverse

Americans tend to think of Blacks and Jews as distinct groups: Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching alongside Martin Luther King, Jr.; Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner going down South for Freedom Summer. Some evoke the Beta Israel community of Ethiopia, and a minority recall the Igbo Jews of Nigeria, or the Abayudaya of Uganda. But fewer still know of the Bal Ej, a group of Ethiopian Jews that started splitting from the Beta Israel community in Gondar back in the 15th century, to settle in the North Shewa region of Ethiopia.

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You Don’t Have To Be Jewish To Love Shabbat Dinner

Thousands of Jerusalem’s non-Jewish tourists pay to enjoy a special meal they can’t find in any restaurant: Friday night dinner in a Jewish home

By Sara Toth Stub for Tablet Magazine


On a recent Friday evening in Jerusalem, more than a dozen participants from a Chinese business delegation snapped photos of each other waiting outside a house in Nachlaot, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood best known for the famed Machane Yehuda outdoor food market. At this hour, the market was shuttered and empty, and various renditions of the kiddush could be heard coming from the densely populated hodgepodge of newly renovated and dilapidated apartments stacked along the area’s winding alleyways.

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Seeing the Lower East Side plainly for what it really was

By Elliot Jager for The Villager
By the time I came on the scene in 1954, the Jewish Lower East Side was basically finished. I don’t mean to irk former Grand St. neighbors or more recently arrived denizens, but those who yearn nostalgically for the “good old LES” most likely had little firsthand experience of the real thing.

Irving Howe’s epic history of the East European migration to the United States, and of the LES as a landing point, is decidedly not a work of nostalgia. His evocative “World of Our Fathers” wraps up a good few years before my bar mitzvah when I was 13 by describing the dismal

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Guest Post: Living Life Alone

Posted by Rabbi Richard Address in Jewish Sacred Aging

For many of us, the “holiday season” begins with Rosh Hashanah, and moves on thru Yom Kippur, Thanksgiving, Chanukkah, Christmas, and finally New Year.

If we are fortunate, we have friends who are sensitive to our “family-less” situation, and invite us to be part of their celebrations and rituals.  I am always greatful for these invitations and enjoy being part of what are often boisterous, fun, memory filled days.  But there is a part of me that recognizes that I am different – an outsider looking in.  Without spouse or partner, children or grandchildren, I lack common ground.  And often, I return home with feelings of sadness and loneliness – that awful isolation that makes my apartment feel so empty.

Much is written about this.  But what about the rest of the year?  How does living alone and without family effect day to day living?

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Hollywood's Last Survivors

Seventy years ago, the Holocaust ended. Only 11 people who lived through it remain from the world of entertainment. Now, in gripping video testimonials, Oscar winners, actors, Dr. Ruth and even Judy Garland's hairstylist tell their personal stories, filled with hope and horror, one last time as their themes of genocide, displacement and discrimination continue to resonate today. Plus:The Roman Polanski interview

Produced by Peter Flax for The Hollywood Reporter

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