It\’s not unusual to see 60 students cramming into an nonairconditioned duplex on fraternity row on a Saturday night at UCLA — unless
those students happen to be surrounding a havdalah candle singing Hebrew songs.
While Sharon Schatz Rosenthal\’s cover story notes that day schools are costly, it fails to address cost efficiency (\”Who Should Pay?\” Jan.31).
Non-Orthodox Jews both inside and outside Israel are celebrating a historic court ruling recognizing Reform and Conservative conversions as valid and binding upon the Jewish state.
Leaders of Conservative Judaism have argued from their pulpits for more than 50 years that the Torah is a divinely inspired document that evolved over centuries, rather than the product of a single encounter with God at Mount Sinai. Starting this month, their congregants will finally be able to follow along in the pews with a Conservative Bible commentary that says the same thing.
The next chapter in the struggle for normality in Judaism on the part of gay men and lesbians will take place within Conservative Judaism over admission to rabbinical school.
The Academy for Jewish Religion, a transdenominational rabbinical seminary, will open its doors in Los Angeles this fall, giving formal expression to a longtime trend toward a more personalized, spiritually oriented, pluralistic Judaism, academy founders say.
Amos Oz, Hebrew novelist, secular prophet and self-proclaimed \”non-synagogue\” Jew, has joined his local Reform congregation in Arad, the Negev desert town where he has lived since leaving Kibbutz Hulda a decade ago.
Reuven Hammer is an American-born Conservative rabbi who has lived in Jerusalem since 1973, working as a writer and teacher — Conservative rabbi is not much of a career option inIsrael — and raising five kids along the way. Among variouspart-time jobs, he heads the bet din, or rabbinical court, whichoversees Conservative conversions in Israel.
New York publishing executive Steven Baum is a lifelong Conservative Jew who recently joined a Reform temple, and he\’s not happy about it. \”There\’s hardly any Hebrew,\” he says. \”They don\’t wear yarmulkes. It\’s just not the Judaism I grew up with.\”
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