Everything Is Illuminated,\” Jonathan Safran Foer\’s tragi-comic tale of a young American Jew\’s journey through Ukraine in search of his grandfather\’s roots, is the first winner of JBooks.com\’s People\’s Choice Award for the decade\’s best work of Jewish fiction at the Koret International Jewish Book Awards ceremony in San Francisco.
Say you\’re a few years out of college, living with friends and working in a low-paying job for some do-good organization. You don\’t go to synagogue, but you miss the camaraderie of your college Hillel, and you like to invite people over for Shabbat meals.
Imagine if someone was willing to pay you to keep doing it?
A brief rundown of the national synagogue revitalization programs that have arisen since the early 1990s.
There are more than 3,000 synagogues in America. Why do some of them struggle week after week to make a minyan, while others are bustling with energy, song and laughter?
Jewish communities are being urged to remain vigilant, be in touch with police and other law enforcement agencies and review their security arrangements after a fatal shooting at Seattle\’s Jewish federation offices. The alleged gunman, identified by police as Naveed Afzal Haq, said he was an American Muslim upset about what was going on in Israel.
Rabbi Deborah Bravo of Temple B\’nai Jeshurun in Short Hills, N.J., went through plenty of placement interviews after her 1998 ordination as a Reform rabbi. Everywhere, she got the same question: not about her attitude toward homosexuality, not whether she wore a kippah and tallit, but whether she would officiate at an intermarriage. \”It has become the litmus test for placement,\” Bravo said in San Diego at last month\’s annual convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), the Reform movement\’s rabbinical association.
Stephen Lachter didn\’t know what to expect when a friend dragged him to a men\’s club meeting at his Conservative synagogue five years ago.
\”My father was in a men\’s club, and to me, it was guys sitting around playing pinochle and volunteer ushering,\” he admitted.
Lachter was surprised to see \”interesting people having serious discussions,\” and he \”fell into a session on kiruv,\” or outreach, to intermarried families. \”I said to myself, this is something shuls need to be talking about.\”
Eighteen months ago, when Lenard Cohen\’s 4-year-old daughter was enrolled in the family\’s congregational preschool, the Philadelphia-area father of three decided to go back to school himself.
Margie Pomerantz and her fellow volunteers from Congregation Beth David, a nearby Conservative synagogue, were out looking for Jews. In a supermarket. Unaffiliated Jews, if possible, but they weren\’t being picky.
The last few months have seen a flood of studies of Gen-Y Jews — all trying to map their sense of Jewish identity, affiliation patterns, needs, hopes, beliefs and behaviors.
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