Joanne Palmer
When saying kaddish doesn’t work
Before I ever had to say kaddish as a mourner, I was entranced by its music.
In 1934 the British writer Dorothy Sayers published The Nine Tailors, a fairly unconvincing mystery that provided a framework for a pastoral idyll. The book centered around bell-ringers who climbed up a church tower to pull the massive ropes attached to the brass behemoths that hung there. They were ringing the changes, following mathematical formulas that permitted subtle variations, playing the huge bells with paradoxical delicacy.
Young scholar’s memory to be honored at JTS
It wasn't supposed to end like this.
Just over a year ago, Leah Levitz Fishbane was 3' years old; happily married to Dr. Eitan Fishbane, an up-and-coming young scholar; the mother of nearly 4-year-old Aderet and about two trimesters away from giving birth to another baby. She was also an unusually promising graduate student, working under Brandeis University's Dr. Jonathan Sarna on a dissertation about young Jewish leaders of the 1880s, a group particularly relevant today. Her passions for Jewish living, her family, Jewish history, her friends, her life, and her work inextricably connected, she seemed destined for a life of love and leadership.
Religious pluralism in Israel to be topic in Ridgewood
David Lissy, CEO of the Masorti Foundation, will speak in Ridgewood on Monday night.
There is a huge, pent-up demand for Jewish identity and spirituality in Israel, David Lissy plans to tell the audience at Temple Israel and Jewish Community Center in Ridgewood on Monday night.
Increasingly, he will say, some of those Jews are turning to the Masorti movement, the Israeli branch of what is called the Conservative movement in North America and Masorti Olami in the rest of the world.
That is a big change, said Lissy, who is executive director and chief executive officer of the Masorti Foundation for Conservative Judaism in Israel, in a telephone interview from its headquarters in Manhattan. "Masorti's message is that you can be spiritual and traditional and at the same time egalitarian, and deal with the modern world. This message is beginning to resonate with Israelis, who are increasingly disaffected — no, that is too mild a term — who are increasingly estranged from religious life because of the rabbinut," the offices of the Ashkenazi and Sephardi chief rabbis, who control much of what in the United States would be civil life.
‘Four chaplains’ award to two people from area
On Feb. 3, 1943, an aging luxury liner, the Dorchester, was struck by German torpedoes off the coast of Greenland. Most of the young servicemen packed aboard, headed for the war in Europe, died, but '30 of them were rescued.
Among the 67' dead were four chaplains, whose quick thinking, level-headedness, goodness, and pure heroism saved many of those '30.
Among the four chaplains, like the army units in World War II movies, was one of almost everything — a Catholic priest, a Methodist minister, a Dutch Reformed minister, and a rabbi. The four met at a training program at Harvard Divinity School and are said by the survivors, who watched them go down, to have linked arms as they stood together on the deck of the sinking ship.
