It calls on the government to establish Jewish religious courts that \”will base themselves on appropriate moderate and tolerant prior halachic decisions to allow the conversion process to move forward.
Although the Orthodox community is committed to the existing ketubah document, whose language comes from the Mishnah, Blau said he has no problem with a bride and a groom making additional agreements and commitments, as long as they do not controvert Jewish law.
While not everyone is jumping on the \’I gotta be me\’ funeral bandwagon, a funny thing is happening on the way to the mortuary. When it comes to thinking about the end of life, be it in the business of funeral homes or in the minds of Jews everywhere, the world is changing.
Agriprocessor raid\’s effects ripple across the community
Like other virtual learning and videoconferencing, Web Yeshiva students see and hear each other and the instructor in the virtual classroom.
The pain felt by the family and near environment of any murder victim is deep and traumatic. The murder of adolescents in an educational institution is horrifying. But a murder that takes place within the walls of the house of study, the yeshiva, amplifies and extends the grief and suffering beyond the families that lost their dear ones and beyond the victims\’ close surroundings.
In Israel, the \”non-Jewish Jews,\” as some Israelis call them, are everywhere. They drive buses, teach university classes, patrol in army jeeps and follow the latest Israeli reality TV shows as avidly as their Jewish counterparts. For these people — mostly immigrants from the former Soviet Union who are not Jews according to Israeli law — the question of where they fit into the Jewish state remains unanswered nearly two decades after they began coming to Israel.
\”Numbers don\’t keep me up at night; Israel keeps me up at night,\” Eisen said. \”I\’m worried about the security of Israel, and I\’m worried about the apparent decline in attachment on the part of American Jews to Israel. This literally, from time to time, keeps me up at night.\”
Despite the popular view of what we were arguing about, I believe that the subject of gays was not what we were really divided over. It happened to be the specific subject that revealed the real fault lines in the committee, and in the Conservative movement in general.
The question of whether Talmud is indeed part of Jewish learning for girls and women in traditional Orthodox education has come under debate in the last two decades in Orthodox circles.
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