Mikvah attendance requires conscious, vigorous preparation, including bathing, washing and combing the hair, cutting fingernails and removing all jewelry, makeup or anything that is a barrier between a woman and the mikvah waters. It gives a woman the opportunity to luxuriate in being \”squeaky clean\” and offers a time to focus on the miracles of being a woman.
Here\’s a variation on Wolpe\’s idea — let your children stand in awe in front of the bimah, but then take them behind the bimah. Raise the curtain and demystify the sanctuary. By doing so you help them feel comfortable.
Synagogue transformation programs exude good intentions, but do they actually work?
One year after \”the storm,\” as New Orleanians refer to Hurricane Katrina, Jewish communal leaders describe the health of the community with certain expected terms — loss, trauma, devastation and challenge.
Jewish organizations throughout the Los Angeles area, as well as supportive Christian groups, are shifting their fundraising efforts into high gear to succor civilians and soldiers in embattled Israel.
My daughter Rachel is a Jewish American girl from China. She is not the only Asian girl in her school — there are three, all adopted (two from China, one from Vietnam) — and she says she feels no different from anyone else. But among the mix of mostly Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews that make up our community, she adds a special spice. And in her own discreet style, I believe she has helped teach her friends to be colorblind in ways that could last a lifetime.
On Sunday, in the intense heat of a mid-summer day, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, carried a Sephardic Torah for one-half mile along city streets in Tarzana to a new Persian synagogue that had been the victim of an anti-Semitic attack just two days earlier. Police are still investigating the arson attempt, which burned a rear door of Beith David Education Center on Clark Street, as well as anti-Jewish graffiti left at the scene, as a hate crime.
Following an inquiry by the mayor\’s office and City Councilman Dennis Zine, the LAPD reported that patrols of the area will be stepped up in advance of the new shul\’s Sunday ceremony.
Tonight is a Yiddish service, Zol Zahn Shabbes — literally, we should have Shabbat — and it\’s happening at Beth Chayim Chadashim (BCC), founded in 1972 as the world\’s first synagogue for lesbian and gay Jews.
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