An announcement last week by the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) that it will not renew leases for its West San Fernando Valley properties will have an impact on two Jewish institutions: Kadima Hebrew Academy and the Rabbi Max D. Raiskin West Valley Hebrew Academy.
The firing of Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Regional Director David Lehrer has stunned and saddened a broad swath of the local Jewish community.
Can one Jewish Community Center (JCC) serve a population as vast as that of the San Fernando Valley?
That is the question facing Jewish communities from Burbank to Calabasas, and so far, the answer is a resounding no — even from some of the people who launched the idea in the first place.
They\’re celebrating the fourth night of Chanukah at the Chai Teen and Youth Center, and, to put it mildly, this joint is jumping.
Sitting in her seat at the Max Factor Family Foundation Recreation Center of the Jewish Home for the Aging (JHA), 103-year-old Sylvia Harmatz cannot recall the first state to give women the right to vote. But, she remembers very clearly the first day she voted, in 1936. \”I wasn\’t a citizen until I married my husband, and so I used his papers and got a ballot so I could vote for [Franklin D.] Roosevelt,\” she said. \”I was very active in politics from that time on.\”
It used to be said that kabbalah should only be studied by the very old or very learned, otherwise it could inspire madness. In his book \”Practical Kabbalah: A Guide to Jewish Wisdom in Everyday Life,\” Rabbi Laibl Wolf attempts both to dispel the mythology surrounding this ancient, mystical teaching and to demonstrate its necessity for those of us living in the modern world.
Students, faculty and staff members at CSUN were up in arms last week regarding an exhibit sponsored by the university\’s Muslim Student Association (MSA). The \”Museum of Intolerance\” exhibit, part of planned activities for the campus\’ Islam Awareness Week (Oct. 21-27), showed photographs of Muslims under attack in several nations including what it called Palestine, with prominent pictures of Israeli soldiers and of Palestinian Arabs throwing rocks.
In a rustic little corner of Chatsworth, flanked by trees and horses and dry, dusty land, sits the nerve center of the oldest interfaith program in the San Fernando Valley.
From its offices in a building owned by a United Methodist church, the Valley Interfaith Council (VIC) has, for 37 years, quietly provided an outlet for religious organizations to pool their resources and feed the hungry, shelter the homeless and support the elderly while allowing Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims an opportunity to learn tolerance by sharing mitzvot.
Interfaith programs — a concept which up until recently provoked a ho-hum attitude at best — are suddenly sweeping the country as people of all faiths struggle to come to terms with events of the past five weeks.
To look at one example, Valley Beth Shalom\’s lecture series \”One God: Many Faces,\” beginning this week, had already been a year in the making before the recent tragedies, but it could not have come at a more significant time, according to the synagogue\’s Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis.
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