The nondenominational Pre-Collegiate Learning Center of New Jersey does not have a math teacher. The East Brunswick school instead relies on experienced math tutors who help students work through an online math curriculum relying on outside sources.
At Baltimore’s Ohr Chadash, a Modern Orthodox primary school in its first year, students receive iPads beginning in the fourth grade to do more online and group work.
“The things the teachers ask us to do for work are fun,” said nine-year-old Nili Hefetz, a fourth-grader at the school. For example, using Adobe Ideas, Nili and other students draw pictures on the iPads inspired by the Bible lessons.
In football, there are usually three B’s tailgaters keep in mind: Burgers, brats, and beer.
When it comes to Super Bowl Sunday, however, when parties move indoors, menus tend to change to less barbecue-intensive fare and foods fit more for large groups gathered around a television. And while many Super Bowl parties feature heaps of beef-laden cheesy nachos, hot wings with bleu cheese dressing, and pork, kosher football fans — and kosher caterers — have adapted.
“It’s an American holiday,” said Bobby Shorr, co-owner of Harold’s Kosher Market in Paramus. “It’s a big holiday. It’s a very big catering weekend for all kinds of delis. We look forward to it.”
The Orthodox Union is more than just that little OU symbol on your can of baked beans, and that message was the focus on the OU’s biennial convention over the weekend in Woodcliff Lake.
More than 700 people from across the country came out to the Hilton in Woodcliff Lake, where more than 25 sessions during Sunday’s one-day conference on Jewish life focused on Torah, synagogue life, and communal life. The OU also installed its new president, Rabbi Simcha Katz of Teaneck, and passed a series of resolutions to guide the organization through the next two years.
Day-school tuition: At least $13,000 a year per child.
Kosher chicken: $2 to $3 more per pound than non-kosher chicken.
Kippot, tzitzit, tallitot, sheitels, and regular dry cleaning for these and other Shabbat and holiday clothes: You don’t want to think about it.
The cost of Jewish living is one of the most talked-about topics in the community, said Nachum Segal, host of the radio show JM in the AM, who moderated a panel on the subject on Saturday night to kick off the Orthodox Union’s national convention. Before a crowd of about 400 at Teaneck’s Cong. Keter Torah, Segal questioned a panel of political and communal leaders about why costs have gotten out of control and what can be done.
When Rabbi Simcha Katz arrived at the Orthodox Union’s New York offices on Monday, the first thing he did was turn on the lights. Newly installed as the organization’s 13th president, Teaneck resident Katz has plans to shine a light on what he sees as the two biggest threats to the Jewish community: Tuition costs and assimilation.
The father of Teaneck councilman and businessman Elie Katz, Simcha Katz was inaugurated as president on Sunday during the OU’s national convention in Woodcliff Lake.
In September, Stephen Savitsky, then the OU’s president, asked Katz about assuming the organization’s leadership. Katz, a retired businessman who had spent the past five years as chair of the OU’s kashrut division and many more years working in the division with its CEO, Rabbi Menachem Genack of Englewood, was reluctant about making the time commitment.
The Teaneck Jewish organization that last year won approval from the township’s board of adjustment to partially turn a private home into a house of worship filed suit against the board last month, challenging the “offensive conditions” placed on the synagogue.
According to the lawsuit, filed in mid-December in New Jersey Superior Court, the modern Orthodox congregation Etz Chaim “is not able to proceed as a fully-operational Orthodox Jewish house of worship” and requests that the court overturn the BoA’s conditions on the variances, which the suit argues are ambiguous and restrictive.
A kosher restaurant can be made or broken on the quality of its certification. In Teaneck, Ima Restaurant, open for less than a year, has become embroiled in a feud between the local rabbinical board and a national kashrut agency, each accusing the other of impropriety.
Ofira Zaken of Fair Lawn opened Ima in late May with supervision by the Rabbinical Council of Bergen County. It occupied the former site of Café Adam, a dairy restaurant that also had issues with certification that eventually led to its closure.
A distinctly Indian melody flows from Rabbi Andrew Hahn’s harmonium. People rise from their seats, hips swaying, arms waving slowly through the air as they slowly repeat the Hebrew words Hahn is chanting.
This isn’t your abba’s Lecha Dodi.
Hahn, aka the Kirtan rabbi, will bring his unique blend of Indian and Hebrew chanting to the United Synagogue of Hoboken Saturday night. Kirtan is a call-and-response, participatory form of chanting that originated in the Hindu temples of India. Kirtan is also considered to be the highest form of yoga, bhakti or spiritual yoga.
Thousands of Jewish communal leaders from around the world gathered earlier this week in New Orleans for the annual General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America, the biggest pow-wow of Jewish leaders in the world.
UJA Federation of Northern New Jersey sent a 17-member delegation, led by co-chairs Gale S. and David Bindelglass of Franklin Lakes. The event was headlined by speeches from Vice President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who both spoke of the strong U.S.-Israel relationship, but the conference centered on cultivating the next generation of Jewish leaders, and the local participants felt the push to get the younger leaders involved.
“The real focus of this year’s GA was on youth, the next generation,” said Alan Scharfstein, president of UJA-NNJ, who noted that more than 700 college students attended the conference through Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life. “It was the youngest GA that I can certainly remember.”
“People who go down to New Orleans and stay in the tourist area will think that the city has come back and is looking terrific,” Goodman said. “And it is, it’s really exciting to see how much of the downtown has come back. A lot of people don’t get the opportunity to travel into the neighborhoods we go into, to see the work that still needs to get done.”
The Klene-Up Krewe split into two groups in St. Bernard. Some worked on rebuilding homes for people who could not afford to rebuild after Katrina or have been cheated by contractors, while others went to work clearing plots of land the St. Bernard Project received in the Ninth Ward to build new homes.
