The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism has become one of the pre-eminent Jewish political organizations in the country, at the forefront of issues such as ending the genocide in Darfur, promoting human rights, and fighting poverty.
On Jan. 14 and 15, Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, the Reform movement will celebrate Shabbat Tzedek, marking the RAC’s 50th anniversary.
Its founding in 1961 reflected a belief among its founders that as Jews who care about tikkun olam, repairing the world, they had to care about more than issues that affected them as Jews, said Barbara Weinstein, legislative director of the RAC.
Some 250 high school students from across the country will gather at the Religious Action Center’s Washington headquarters this weekend for the Bernard and Audre Rapoport L’Taken Social Justice Seminar for High School Students.
Students are scheduled to arrive in Washington this afternoon and will spend the weekend learning about domestic issues like poverty and separation of church and state and global issues like genocide and climate change. The teens will then spend Monday lobbying their representatives on Capitol Hill.
Monday marked the first day in 2011 at UJA Federation of Northern New Jersey, and also the first day without Howard Charish, its executive vice president who retired at the end of last month after eight years with the federation.
David Gad-Harf, the interim executive vice president, and Robert Hyman, the interim associate executive vice president and chief operating officer, have assumed the leadership of the federation while a search committee looks for Charish’s successor. They began the transition Monday morning by asking the federation’s employees what characteristics described Charish’s term and what they wanted to continue.
Rep. Steve Rothman wrote to President Nicolas Sarkozy of France last week, urging him to reconsider his country’s reported plans to sell anti-tank missiles to the Lebanese Armed Forces.
The letter cited reports that France intends to sell 100 Haut subsonique Optiquement Téléguidé Tiré d’un Tube anti-tank missile systems to the LAF by the end of February. Hezbollah, Rothman (D-9) warned, is in a position to take over the LAF, and if that were to occur, Israel could be in danger from France’s anti-tank missiles.
As North Jersey was digging itself out from last weekend’s blizzard, members of the Jewish community were in mourning for two men killed in separate accidents.
Dr. Michael Lippe, 56, of Mahwah was flying to the Rochester, N.Y., area when his plane crashed Wednesday, Dec. 22, in upstate New York. For 15 years Lippe had been emergency room director at Good Samaritan Hospital in Suffern. For the past year he had been working at Geneva General Hospital in Geneva, N.Y., in the Finger Lakes region, and that’s where he was going when his plane crashed. According to the Yates County Sheriff’s Office in New York, Lippe was flying through freezing rain and sleet when the plane went down in Barrington, N.Y., after striking trees. His single-engine Mooney M-20 lost a wing and front engine.
In another tragedy, Dr. Paul Kudowitz, 57, of Englewood was killed in a hit-and-run accident last Friday night in Englewood while walking home from shul. Englewood police declined to give details of the case, but said the investigation was continuing.
Both men were recalled with affection and respect by those who knew them.
Some 150 public-school teenagers from around the country will forgo ski trips and New Year’s parties during their winter vacations next week to study Torah with NCSY and spend New Year’s Eve at a shabbaton in Teaneck.
Tuesday marks the first day of the Yarchei Kallah, an annual study program geared toward NCSY teenagers from non-Orthodox backgrounds. Students will hear speakers from around the world, including scholar-in-residence Rabbi Menachem Nissel of Jerusalem, at the Hilton Hotel in Stamford, Conn., during the five-day program. In the past, NCSY leaders have made Shabbat in the hotel for the students, but this year they wanted to provide a different experience. On Friday, Dec. 31, the students will arrive in Teaneck for a Shabbaton at Cong. Keter Torah, where many of the students will have their first “authentic Shabbat experience,” according to organizers.
A Hoboken synagogue sparked a journey into the past for a woman who recently learned about the role her grandfather played in that city’s Jewish community.
Joyce Levine of Washington Township earlier this year learned from her uncle that the Star of Israel synagogue in Hoboken at one point had a plaque bearing the name of his father, Levine’s grandfather, William Ressler.
The Hoboken Jewish Center, founded in the 1920s as a Conservative synagogue, merged with Star of Israel, an Orthodox synagogue founded in 1910, to become in 1947 the United Synagogue of Hoboken, which now meets in the former Star of Israel building. William Ressler had been one of Star of Israel’s founders.
The Reform movement that is marking its 200th anniversary this year looks vastly different from the movement that began as a rejection of what early Reform Jews saw as the rigid and outdated Judaism of their parents.
Today’s Reform Jews aren’t rebelling, because they don’t know as much about their religious traditions, said Rabbi Stephen Wylen of Temple Beth Tikvah in Wayne.
“That has resulted in a return to tradition,” said Wylen who has spent the past 30 years as a Reform rabbi, navigating the movement’s changes. He chose Beth Tikvah because the synagogue has more of a focus on tradition, which he said he likes. And he has noticed a yearning among his congregants to give their children more in-depth Jewish educations than they themselves had.
When the members of Cong. Beth Am gathered at the Teaneck synagogue earlier this month for a Chanukah party, their cheer was dampened by the knowledge that this would be their last Chanukah celebration as a congregation.
Faced with dwindling membership and income, the leaders of the almost-50-year-old Reform synagogue first announced in May that the shul would close when its building appeared in a “For sale” listing on the Teaneck shul’s listserv. The plan had been to court four area Reform synagogues and pick one to merge with. After a series of meetings and visits in the past few months, however, the congregation was divided. And so, when Beth Am closes its doors for the last time in June, its 35 member-families will go different ways, with just more than half going to Temple Sinai in Tenafly, a large number joining Temple Emeth in Teaneck, and a handful joining Cong. Adas Emuno in Leonia. Synagogue leaders are working to smooth the transition and divide Beth Am’s religious texts and other items.
The United States continues to deal with repercussions of the WikiLeaks revelations, while the Israel-Palestinian conflict has taken a new turn.
WikiLeaks and Lockerbie
WikiLeaks revealed last week that Libya threatened Great Britain with “harsh, immediate” consequences if Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the sole person convicted in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, died in prison. Megrahi, who was diagnosed with prostate cancer while serving his life sentence, was released from Scottish prison in August 2009 after doctors said he had only months to live.
