A story is told of a man who came to his rabbi complaining of depression. His life lately seemed like an endless string of failures, disappointments and missed opportunities.
A name and date in a yellowing ledger. An inscription on a crumbling tombstone. A birth certificate. A walk along a dusty street in an Eastern European village. A faded family photograph. Sometimes a newly discovered relative.
The 200-seat chapel at Sinai Temple was crammed with Hollywood luminaries of yesterday and today, when Rabbi David Wolpe called Issur ben Heshel to the Torah for his bar mitzvah reading and speech.
The Anti-Defamation League is not amused by a \”Saturday Night Live\” satire in which cast members, posing as pop stars, said that Jews own all the banks and that Christians have forgiven them for \”killing our Lord.\”
Edward James Olmos wants to connect. Give him a large multi-ethnic crowd — as was on hand Sunday at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles — and he\’ll split himself into pieces finding common links.
It has a gym. It has a teen center. And with Sunday\’s well-covered dedication, the new $4.5 million state-of-the-art Ferne Milken Youth & Sports Complex — an addition to the Bernard Milken Jewish Community Campus in West Hills — now has a lot of visibility.\n\n
Melodic harmonies echo through Dominus Flevit, a small-but-quaint church on the slopes of the Mount of Olives, as a group of 30 Christian Bible scholars and pastors sing \”Hallelujah to the Lord,\” first in English, then Hebrew.
Built in 1955 on the ruins of an ancient church, the teardrop-shaped structure commands a breathtaking view of the eastern walls of Jerusalem\’s Old City. According to Christian tradition, Jesus, knowing his prophetic message would be rejected, wept here as he viewed the illusion of a tranquil city that, in fact, was bitterly divided, its Jewish population suffering under a brutal Roman occupation.
Dear Mr. Prime Minister;
By now you have certainly received thousands of congratulatory messages celebrating the good news that you and your wife, Cherie, are expecting a baby next summer.
You go out. You talk to a lot of people you don\’t know. Maybe you gossip a little. Maybe you flirt. Maybe you try too hard and end up acting just a bit like someone else.
You wake up the next day with the uneasy feeling that you\’ve just gotten drunk and had a one-night stand. But you haven\’t. You just have what I think of as a mild \”shameover,\” that uneasy feeling that you\’ve woken up with a stranger and that stranger is you.
Who would have thought, muses Dr. Uri D. Herscher, that the Skirball Cultural Center would reach such prominence in so short a time.
