Alex Varum was 8 years old when he left Russia. Now 35 and a real estate developer in Silicon Valley, Varum grew up in California, speaks English like a native — much better than Russian — and feels American in every way.
So why would he spend an entire weekend exploring Jewish identity with a group of other young Jews from the former Soviet Union, many of whose personal ties to the Old Country are as negligible as his own?
“I feel somehow that I don’t belong to the American Jewish community,” he says. “I don’t feel Russian — I’m American. But I don’t identify as an American Jew.”
BERKELEY, Calif. – Judaism is a harsh, exacting faith condemning rebellious children to death by stoning. Islam exhorts Muslims to kill non-believers.
Neither statement, according to many Jewish and Muslim scholars, is true. But they are among the most persistent charges laid at the feet of Judaism and Islam by those who are unfamiliar with the basic holy texts of the other’s faith.
Hampered by such ignorance, how can Jews and Muslims engage in real interfaith dialogue?
A new graduate-level course in Berkeley, billed as the first of its kind, aims to rectify this failing, at least for the 40 or so students enrolled.
“Madrasa/Midrasha: Muslim-Jewish Text Study,” a nine-week course spearheaded by the Progressive Jewish Alliance and run by the Center for Jewish Studies and the Center for Islamic Studies of the Graduate Theological Union, introduces students of both faiths to the methodologies and foundational content of the Koran, Torah and Talmud.
Karyn Moskowitz runs the Fresh Stop Project, a food co-op program at a historic black Baptist church in West Louisville, Ky., a low-income, largely African American neighborhood.
One day she and some women at the church were talking about how they cooked fresh greens. One woman said she used bacon fat, like her friends. Moskowitz said she used olive oil, thinking she’d use the conversation as a teaching moment about the health benefits of avoiding saturated fats.
The woman responded: “Olive oil? Where do you get that?”
Moskowitz’s project brought fresh, organic fruits, and vegetables to this community at an affordable price, but there were no real supermarkets in the neighborhood, no place for the residents to purchase other healthful foods. That’s something young Jewish food activists often forget, Moskowitz says.
“We think nothing of driving to Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods. They do not have that option.”
Cong. Ner Tamid in Henderson, Nev., webcasts its bar and bat mitzvah services for family and friends who cannot attend.
The preschool director at Cong. Beth Israel in Charlottesville, Va., tweets from the classroom several times a day, so parents can get a sense of what their children are learning.
Within this past year, synagogues, religious schools, and other Jewish groups have been signing on to Facebook, blogs, Twitter, and other social media eager to learn how new technology can strengthen their organizations and improve their outreach.
TORONTO – The atmosphere was a lot more subdued at this year’s Reform biennial than it was two years ago in San Diego.
Nearly 6,000 people turned out in 2007 to celebrate the largest Jewish religious movement in North America, festively wending their way through a conference so huge it was barely navigable.
This time 3,000 attendees, including more than 600 volunteers from the Toronto Reform community, seemed to be more focused on finding ways to build their congregations and improve their offerings.
“We are a bit more somber than at biennials past,” Union for Reform Judaism President Rabbi Eric Yoffie declared during his Saturday morning sermon, as he described the economic downturn that is forcing Jewish institutions nationwide to slash budgets and restructure.
When Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, delivers his Saturday-morning sermon at the group’s biennial conference, he sets the movement’s priorities for the coming two years.
His message this month in Toronto: Let’s eat like Jews.
He was not asking Reform Jews to observe kosher laws. Rather, acknowledging America’s increased interest in food choices in general, and pointing to Jewish values concerning stewardship of the earth, sustainable agriculture, and treatment of workers, Yoffie urged Reform Jews to develop consciously Jewish and ethical food policies for themselves and their congregations.
PETALUMA, Calif. – Dafna Wu, a 48-year-old San Francisco nurse, resembles her Chinese father more than her Jewish mother. She’s been Jewish her whole life, but she’s used to walking into synagogues and having people ask who she’s with, as if she didn’t belong there of her own accord.
Her oldest daughter, Ruby, 24, looks like the Jewish man who fathered her, “like someone from a Vishniac photo,” Wu says.
When Ruby was a baby, Wu says, “people thought I was her nanny.”
But Wu’s youngest child, 9-year-old Amalia, has a Chinese father and looks Asian. The Hebrew school she attends is filled with mixed-race children, but the parents in the congregation are all white. Amalia is in the minority, which concerns her mother.
On the first day of Rosh HaShanah, Rabbi Moshe Shulman of the Young Israel of St. Louis devoted his sermon to yashrut, the Hebrew notion of fairness and honesty, calling it a “foundational concept” in Jewish life.
“That goes without saying, but sometimes it needs to be said,” he explained in his September talk.
After a year of highly publicized scandals involving Jewish institutions and businessmen, the Orthodox world has been paying markedly greater attention this holiday season to promoting Jewish ethical behavior.
SAN FRANCISCO – What’s the largest kosher restaurant chain?
Mendy’s? Six branches, seven if you count the meat and dairy counters at New York City’s Grand Central Station.
Dougie’s? Five branches in New York and New Jersey, including one in Teaneck.
Don’t even bring up Nathan’s Famous — it stopped making kosher hot dogs altogether.
The dark-horse winner is Subway, the made-to-order sandwich giant poised to open its ninth kosher franchise Aug. 18 inside the Michael-Ann Russell Jewish Community Center in North Miami Beach, Fla. New Subway openings in Indianapolis and Skokie, Ill., will make it 11 by the end of the year. Five more are planned for next year.
BERKELEY, Calif. – With cremation on the rise and more Jewish cemeteries accepting ashes for burial, a national organization of Jewish burial societies is trying to promote traditional in-ground burial among liberal Jews.
“We’re going on the positive offensive rather than the negative ‘don’t get cremated’ route,” said Rabbi Stuart Kelman, president of Kavod v’Nichum, a consortium of burial societies, Jewish funeral homes and cemeteries, and founding rabbi of Berkeley’s Congregation Netivot Shalom, which hosted the group’s seventh national conference June 7-9.
Conference organizers brought in rabbinic speakers to present traditional Jewish sources that teach the human body should be returned after death to the dust from which it was created. According to the Orthodox position, that means burying the body in its entirety, in anticipation of the revivification of the dead that will take place in the final Messianic Age.
