One day last year Rabbi Levi Meier, the Jewish chaplain at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, was summoned to the room of an elderly Russian man in the ICU who had cancer.
He was in poor spirits, so Meier decided to bring in the Torah from the chaplaincy ark. The patient\’s eyes lit up at the sight of the Torah that Meier, and volunteer Sandy Gordon, brought into a room.
Jewish Lamaze was first sponsored by the Los Angeles Bureau of Jewish Education in the early 1980s and taught in various synagogues until the funding ran out toward the end of the decade.
And while it\’s no longer being offered in Los Angeles, as far as anyone knows, similar programs exist elsewhere.
Families are feeling the squeeze of the upward crawl of day school tuition over the last several years, which has brought the average tuition for elementary and middle school to about $12,600 and for high school to as much as $20,000. Those numbers are about 30 percent above what a year of schooling cost four years ago and nearly double 10 years ago.
\”There has been a significant rise in the past four years in anti-Semitism generally and on school campuses,\” said Dr. Kevin O\’Grady, associate director of the Anti-Defamation League\’s (ADL) Orange County/Long Beach Region. O\’Grady\’s office recorded 43 cases of harassment and vandalism last year, nearly 50 percent more than in 2003; one-third of these involved public schools.
Eighteen months ago, when Lenard Cohen\’s 4-year-old daughter was enrolled in the family\’s congregational preschool, the Philadelphia-area father of three decided to go back to school himself.
Michael Sachs remembers that he had initially thought that a program on death wasn\’t really important for people in their 40s.
\”But, in fact,\” he now says, \”I learned things I assumed I wouldn\’t need to think about for many years. I thought the program dealt with potentially distressing material in a nonthreatening, matter-of-fact fashion,\” he said.
The Yiddish words flew — sometimes fluently, sometimes haltingly and occasionally \”shreklich\” or awful as the seniors reached for a word long forgotten or the students for a word they had not yet learned. They raised their voices, gesturing with their hands as they spoke.
\”The primary purpose is to serve the needs of the Orthodox population,\” says Rabbi Ilan Haber, the program\’s national director, who works out of Hillel headquarters in Washington. \”It\’s not an outreach program, it\’s an in-reach to Orthodox students.\”
\”The Federation improved our lives,\” said Khananashvili, now a 48-year-old social worker and Beverly Hills resident. \”They gave us our start here and protected us under their shield. We\’re very grateful.\”
At Temple Beth Israel, the planting project, which is being done in phases with funding and physical assistance from a Jewish environmental group, has transformed congregants\’ preconceived notions of drab native plants.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.