To those who love it, Hava Nashira is less a Jewish summer music workshop and more a calling. Even the name — translated as “come let us sing” — beckons. Started in 1992 by Debbie Friedman and Cantor Jeff Klepper, the sessions originally intended to train camp song leaders have gone on to have a global impact on Jewish music and synagogue life.
This summer was going to be the one — the one when Prissi Cohen’s daughter, Tillie, would finally get to enroll with a friend in a late-summer overnight session at Camp Ramah. But now Cohen’s not so sure. If Tillie, 10, winds up going to a Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) middle school in the fall, she would have to be at her desk two days before camp ends.
I owe Keith Olbermann for enabling me to identify with Bill O’Reilly’s fans.
Ethan Bortnick was just 6 when he first appeared on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” playing snippets of piano works by Bach, Mozart and Scott Joplin. He even performed his own composition, “The Tiger Ran Away at the Zoo.” By that age, he had already raised $12 million for Miami Children’s Hospital. Since then, he has performed for the Chabad Telethon and the Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces, among other charities.
In a rehearsal room of the Ahmanson Theatre, Moises Kaufman recounts a story about Ludwig van Beethoven, a central figure in his new play, “33 Variations” — or, rather, a story about the composer’s hair. When Beethoven died in 1827, the custom was to trim the locks of famous decedents to sell as relics; eventually some of that hair came into the possession of a Jewish family, who traded it for their freedom from the Nazis.
After sitting idly in the hands of the state for five years, a bequest of $100,000 designated to help mentally challenged and blind Jewish children was turned over to Cedars-Sinai’s Maxine Dunitz Children’s Health Center in December. The donation, which has been named the Beatrice Mazure Fund in honor of the donor, will be used primarily to care for children in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).
In April 2009, the Los Angeles wing of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) looked like it might shut down. The leading school for training Reform rabbis, cantors, Jewish educators and others had been badly hurt by the financial crisis, and its leaders were entertaining the possibility of closing two of its four campuses in order to eliminate a $3 million budget shortfall.
Civility? Check. Clean energy? Check. Health care? Check. Immigration? Check. Education? You bet.
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