Memorial Day weekend will be especially poignant for Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel, a congregation with a tradition of honoring war veterans and members of the Jewish War Veterans (Department of California).
My first and only experience at summer camp was magical, or so it seemed to me. I entered a world I had never known before, and by summer\’s end had gained some recognition into who I was and who I was not. No mean feat at 13.
Kissandra Cohen had everything going for her.A certified child prodigy with a sky-high IQ, by age 20 she had finished law school and was heading toward an MBA degree.\n\n
Sure, there\’s going to be bugs. And food that\’s fun to make fun of. And a couple of bouts of homesickness. But camping, the experts agree, is good for children. \”It\’s a great equalizer,\” says Arthur Pinchev, director of youth and family programming at the Brandeis-Bardin Institute, \”It\’s one place where kids can really be kids,\” away from the pressures of school and family life.
Rabbi Shlomo Riskin explains the role of the toenet, or female advocate, in religious divorce trials at a fundraiser held May 14 in Beverly Hills
Hollywood met Jerusalem this Mother\’s Day, when the tennis court at the north Beverly Hills home of bestselling authors Jonathan and Faye Kellerman was transformed into a Tel Aviv rabbinic court hearing the ugly details of a divorce gone awry.
It\’s a clear, sunny weekday in May. A man wearing a hardhat shaped like a Stetson materializes from a construction site. His name is Rodney Freeman, and he is a member of The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles\’ Real Estate & Construction Division. He is also on the committee supervising the biggest enterprise ever undertaken by L.A.\’s Jewish Federation – the refurbishing of the nonprofit organization\’s 6505 Wilshire Blvd. headquarters.
Scenes from Lishma, a joint project of Camp Ramah and the University of Judaism\’s Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, in which young adults engage in a six-week program of serious spiritual practice and text study.\nLast year, as summer approached, Julie Pelc was moving towards a master\’s degree in education, with plans to go on to rabbinical school. Andrew Weitz was serving as the northeast field representative of the United Jewish Communities, working with Jewish student leaders on outreach and social action projects. Jonathan Dorff was finishing up his first year of medical school. All three of these young Jewish adults found themselves faced with the luxury of a free summer, what Dorff calls, \”my last summer off ever.\” All chose to take part in Lishma, the six-week egalitarian yeshiva-study program newly inaugurated by Camp Ramah in California.
The Reform rabbis\’ recent resolution on same-gender officiation affirms two mutually contradictory actions: It supports any Reform rabbi who wishes to perform a same-sex ritual, including, though not so specified, marriage; and it supports any Reform rabbi who refuses to perform same-sex rituals.In an important way, there is nothing new in this resolution. A Reform rabbi could always have performed a same-sex commitment service. Nothing in Reform Judaism would have prevented Reform rabbis from doing so 10, 20, or 50 years ago, because there are no religious standards in Reform Judaism (this is not criticism, it is description). Reform rabbis can do anything they want ritually. So a Reform Jew can celebrate Shabbat on Tuesday. Indeed, for decades many Reform synagogues held Shabbat services on Sundays.
Today, schoolchildren in Israel and California can become best friends over the Internet.
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