Last week, the Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles (JCF) awarded more than $1 million to five new and innovative programs aimed at improving Jewish life in the Los Angeles area.
In an intimate conversation on Aug. 29 with 35 young Iranian American Jewish leaders, Congressman Henry Waxman cautioned against associating support for Israel more with one party than the other. “It shouldn’t be a Republican cause,” the 17-term Democratic congressman said. “Whatever political differences we have as Democrats and Republicans, there should be no difference in our support of the United States-Israel relationship.”
On Aug. 30, the first day of classes at the new Albert Einstein Academy charter school in Santa Clarita, some of the 200 entering seventh-, eighth- and ninth-graders will be singing “Havah Nagilah.”
The monsoon rains that flooded Pakistan’s northwest region started nearly a month ago and have killed more than 1,000 people. Millions more are homeless. Roads and railways have been damaged, along with schools and other civic infrastructure. The impact on the country’s crops is still being calculated and could run into the billions of dollars. And although heart-wrenching pictures of desperate Pakistanis wading through waters have been on the front pages of newspapers for a couple of weeks, aid from Americans, including from Jews, has only just begun to arrive.
Stephen D. Smith, who will complete his first year as the Shoah Foundation Institute’s executive director later this month, gets asked the question every day: How does a non-Jewish Englishman end up running the largest collection of Holocaust survivor testimonies in the world?
Proposition 8 was overturned in part because it placed “the force of [U.S.] law behind stigmas against gays and lesbians,” according to a ruling by Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker. Just days before, in a statement released in late July that draws extensively on Jewish law, a group of Orthodox rabbis and educators wrote that even though halachah prohibits homosexual sex and same-sex relationships, gay Jews in their communities shouldn’t be subjected to social stigma.
In a letter sent Tuesday, Aug. 3, to the leadership of the National Council of Young Israel, 35 of the organization’s 140 North American branch synagogues formally proposed changes to the national body’s constitution. The amendments would make explicit for the first time the right of Young Israel branches to resign from the group voluntarily and would repeal the clause that allows NCYI to seize the assets of any branch synagogue that is dissolved or expelled. Together, the changes could significantly restrict the punitive actions NCYI can take against its branches.
A new public charter high school in Santa Clarita that was to have required Hebrew language instruction as a “key component” of its curriculum will open this fall with 200 students — who will not be required to study Hebrew.
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