Technology in the Synagogue: A Tale of Two Temples

This week we're highlighting how two synagogues are making use of technology, one in its sanctuary and the other in bringing services to the homebound.  Is your congregation making use of technology?  We'd love to hear how you're using it.

Seeing is Believing: Visual T’filot and the Future of Jewish Worship

By Rabbi Lance J. Sussman, Ph.D. for eJewishPhilanthropy

Three years ago, my synagogue agreed to install large retractable screens on either side of the Ark and mounted projectors on the back wall of our 900 seat sanctuary. With almost no resistance, we quickly transitioned from late 15th century technology to early 21th century modalities of communicating.

It was a relatively easy process. In addition to her musical talents, our Cantor discovered she had an inherent talent for developing liturgical power point. What size font, which colors, Hebrew versus transliteration, translation versus epitomes of the text, iconic images versus new art and still life versus video instantly presented themselves as questions we needed to address. One by one, we worked our way through the various technological and philosophical issues.

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 Shattering The Isolation of Homebound Jews

Rabbi Dina Rosenberg, Special To The Jewish Week

 Every individual has the right to access and express his or her Judaism in a personal and meaningful way. This is an expansive and inclusive vision, but mere platitude unless we move to make it reality.

Recently, Bay Ridge Jewish Center (BRJC) took a step forward not only for our synagogue, but for congregations everywhere that want to live the value of inclusivity, community growth and engagement.

Golda Seifer, a 101-year-old member of our synagogue, has been unable to attend services for many years. She is a sharp woman who is still fairly independent but is no longer able to leave her home.

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Charles Krauthammer on Judaism and Jewish Identity

The journalist Charles Krauthammer speaks about his Jewish upbringing, the Talmud, Zionism, secular Judaism, and his own faith. (Interview by William Kristol; video, 22 minutes.)

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The New Site That Lets You Snoop Around an Old Polish Jewish Kitchen

By Sarah Zarrow for Jewniverse

Have you ever wanted to step into the past? Not into a famous battle, or a momentous event, but into someone else’s home, to be able to see how that person lived and worked?

A new project from Indiana University lets you do just that. “In Mrs. Goldberg’s Kitchen“ is a digital panorama that visitors can “walk” through, clicking on objects to learn more about the Goldbergs, a real family who lived in a heavily Jewish district in Lodz, Poland, between the two world wars. (Those families would later be the location of the Lodz Ghetto.) A physical version is on display in Lodz’s Central Museum of Textiles.

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Jesus, Herod and the Irgun — All in One Jerusalem Room

2,700 Years of History Unearthed in Old City Prison

By Ben Sales at The Jewish Daily Forward

(JTA) — When Amit Re’em embarked on a 1999 excavation of an abandoned Ottoman prison in the Old City of Jerusalem, he didn’t expect anything revolutionary.

The dig was primarily aimed at inspecting the site before it was transformed into an event space for the nearby Tower of David Museum, and Re’em, then just 28, hoped at most to uncover some remains of a Herodian palace, or maybe part of a wall from the second century.

He did find those things — along with much more.

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‘Hasidic Rebel’ Shulem Deen on leaving Orthodoxy and losing his children

By Julie Wiener for JTA

Shulem Deen, the former Skverer Hasid who for years blogged under the pseudonym “Hasidic Rebel,” has just published a memoir, “All Who Go Do Not Return” (Graywolf Press). Deen, now 40, describes his sheltered life in New Square, the virtually all-Hasidic village an hour north of New York City, and tells how he lost his faith and, ultimately, his five children. Deen, whose slight Yiddish accent shows his roots, recently sat down with JTA (the interview has been condensed and edited).

JTA: Most memoirs of leaving Orthodoxy include an anecdote about the first time the author ate non-kosher food or violated some other fundamental rule, but yours doesn’t. Do you remember those experiences?

Deen: I remember my first treif, but it was unimportant – a chicken quesadilla at a Mexican restaurant. But who cares? I was totally a nonbeliever by then, but there was nowhere to buy treif in New Square, and I still looked like a Hasid. As for Shabbat, I was ready to violate it way before I did. It just didn’t feel like anything to me.

So you didn’t half worry you’d be struck down?

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Turkey’s Secret Jews

By Leah Falk for Jewniverse

When 17th-century heretic Sabbatai Zevi declared himself the messiah and set about making his own rules for Judaism, he amassed a Jewish following across Europe. None too pleased by the groundswell, Ottoman authorities forced Zevi to convert to Islam. His followers were crestfallen. But a few in the Ottoman Empire followed him into his new faith, and became the Donme, Turkey’s version of Iberia’s “crypto-Jews.”

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The resurgence of neo-traditionalism

by Asher Susser for FathomJournal.org

Asher Susser explains the resurgence of tradition throughout the region and its political consequences  for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He was speaking to a Fathom Forum in London on 10 February.
One of the main failures in Western analyses of the Arab Spring was the underestimation of religion as a factor in Middle Eastern politics. When it began, everybody started talking about the secular liberals. The problem is, the secular liberals are virtually non-existent in Arab society – the people who really matter are the Muslim Brotherhood.

If you want to talk about real political organisation, it is invariably of an Islamist character, these days. I wrote a monograph about this five years ago. I examined the rise of Hamas to power in Palestine, arguing that this was not an exceptional development – it was the rule.

When you have free elections, the Islamists either do extremely well or they win. When Jordan had relatively free elections in 1989, the Islamists of various brands got around 40 per cent of the seats in Parliament. The Jordanians have since then cheated in the elections systematically to keep the Islamists out. They changed the election law, fraud, violence – whatever you like – anything but allowing the Islamists to cash in on a free election.

Why is tradition so resilient? I would cite four factors.

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