Angels in America
This week\’s cover story celebrates not make-believe angels, but real live ones.
This week\’s cover story celebrates not make-believe angels, but real live ones.
One thing that pleases Harmatz about being the grand marshal is riding in a convertible. In fact, last year when it rained on the parade, someone suggested they put up the top, but Harmatz wanted it left down.
\”I think of Pompeii,\” wrote Anne Brener in a September article for The Jewish Journal. \”New Orleans was so beautiful.\”
The High Holidays make your mind wander — wander around the people around you and no longer around you.
When a Marine finds himself in a ditch or an abandoned house, suddenly under fire, having to decide where to shoot and who to kill, it may not much matter if the Marine is Jewish. It was before and after the firefights in Iraq that Marine Corps Sgt. Kayitz Finley remembered and confronted his belief.\n\nThe war in Iraq cost Finley his faith for awhile. It also took away 11 buddies — including a close friend — men on whom he\’d depended to get home in one piece. Still, for Finley, the conflict was never the wrong war, the wrong place or the wrong time. For him, the Iraq War was as advertised — a war of liberation, a war keeping faith with the American principle of bringing freedom to those lacking it.\n\n\”Every Marine out there was for the cause,\” said Finley, who served two combat tours in Iraq. \”I believe in the cause, and I wanted to continue what I was doing.\”
The Hotel Edelweiss in St. Moritz and the Hotel Metropol in Arosa are Jewish sanctuaries for observant tourists, offering everything from kosher dining and space for simchas to daily religious services and snow-melt mikvahs.
The paucity of Jews serving on front lines may explain the dwindling numbers of members belonging to Jewish war veteran organizations.
Last February, a class of 17 retirees jumped at the chance to pursue a Jewish rite of passage bypassed in their youth by circumstance or cultural rigidity.
While federal laws require public buildings to provide access for the handicapped, Jay Kruger still encounters restaurants without ramps, public restrooms with hard-to-open doors that trap him inside and theater seating that is spitting distance from the screen.
Don\’t call them synagogues.
They are minyanim, or spiritual communities. They have evolved from shared and individual dreams and from serendipitous, profound and beshert connections. They are new, egalitarian, independent, warm, collaborative and vibrant.
And they are all led by female rabbis.