Drive into The Brandeis-Bardin Institute, up the pepper tree-lined main thoroughfare and through the gates leading to 3,000 acres of rolling hills in the Santa Susana Mountains. Enter a setting so magnificent that it\’s easy to believe, as Rabbi Ed Feinstein of Valley Beth Shalom does, that God lives there.
For more than 25 years, Shofet worked alongside his father, Hacham Yedidia Shofet, the community\’s longtime spiritual leader, who died last summer.
\”I would never have imagined that a Muslim, a president of Pakistan and, more than that, a man in uniform would ever get such a warm reception from the Jewish community,\” Musharraf said as he ascended the platform to excited applause.
Religion. Within the parameters of Judaism it can mean many things.
A wave of recent gatherings has tackled the existential questions facing world Jewry, and many are aimed at or driven by new actors. The slew of new forums focusing on the future of the Jewish people reveals a certain angst about today\’s challenges and raises questions about how much faith Jews have in existing institutions to address those challenges.
You have to hand it to those Presbyterians. Their leaders know what they want, and they won\’t be deflected by things like logic, fairness or the well-being of people in the Middle East.
The UJ has been around since 1947. My office window in Koreatown overlooks the block of Ardmore Avenue where it was originally housed. The university followed the Jewish community west in 1979, settling in to the expansive Familian campus, where it fulfills a unique but hardly problem-free niche in a unique Jewish community.
The Jewish Educator Awards luncheon, hosted by award sponsors the Milken Family Foundation (MFF) and the Bureau of Jewish Education (BJE) of Greater Los Angeles, is a yearly fest of pride, love and admiration for the wide swath of Jews who belong to Los Angeles\’ day school world.
If Jewish federations and agencies fail to forge a close relationship with this highly independent generation of Jews, Jewish charities, experts say, might struggle greatly in years to come.
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