09 Jun 2023 | 20 Sivan 5783
Larry Yudelson
Two weeks ago, when four Jews were killed in a terrorist attack at a kosher supermarket in Paris, Rabbi Yehuda Sarna decided to go to Paris to visit and comfort the community
Rabbi Sarna leads the Bronfman Center for Jewish Life at New York University — the school’s equivalent of a Hillel chapter.
As a native of Montreal, he speaks French. And as a disciple and former intern of Rabbi Avi Weiss, his reaction to a crisis is: “When you feel a personal connection and likely nobody else will be there, just go.”
So two weeks ago, shortly before Shabbat, he posted plans to go to Paris on his Facebook page. Within half an hour, he had found a group of people interested in going with him.
Rutgers professor sizes up French weekly — and its Yiddish antecedents
Charlie Hebdo, the satirical French weekly, entered American consciousness last week when terrorists attacked an editorial meeting, killing 12 people, among them five staff cartoonists.
Afterwards, the phrase “Je suis Charlie” was spread by people who wanted to signal their support for freedom of expression — many of whom, outside of France, had never heard of the publication.
But Edward Portnoy was a longtime Charlie fan.
Dr. Portnoy, who teaches Jewish studies courses at Rutgers, discovered the magazine 20 years ago, when he spent a year in France. When he was a child, when his friends collected baseball cards, he had collected Wacky Packs — stickers that parody actual boxes or labels. Later, he earned a doctorate in Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America; his dissertation was on political cartoons in the American Yiddish press.
LocalPublished: 09 January 2015
So now there’s a how-to-write-a-blessing class. “The parents are really appreciative,” Rabbi Mosbacher said.
“I used to meet with b’nai mitzvah kids and their families twice,” he added. “Now we meet seven times in the course of a year. The last one is right before the bar mitzvah. Now I’m thinking the last one should be after the bar mitzvah. It’s a lot of time on my part, but it’s time well spent in developing a relationship with the kids and with the families.”
While these efforts are designed to connect children and their families to the congregation before the bar or bat mitzvah, the synagogue also has changed its post-b’nai mitzvah connections to the children.
For the first time since 2008, members of Women’s Philanthropy of the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey will travel to Israel together.
The mission will also include a short stay in Poland, timed to coincided with Yom Hashoah.
The Israel portion will coincide with Yom Hazikaron and Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s Memorial Day and Independence Day. It will be in Israel at the same time as another mission of the Jewish Federation, one for men only.
The women’s mission offers a unique chance “for women to travel together and bond together,” said Lauri Bader, one of the co-chairs of the mission and the past co-president of Women’s Philanthropy.
Did the taste of Israel — acquired on Birthright or through a youth group program — leave you hungering for more?
Are you between 19 and 27 years old?
Do you have June and July open on your calendar?
Could your resumé use a boost?
The Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey has the perfect program for you.
“Onward Israel” will immerse you in Israeli life, letting you choose from hundreds of possible two-month internships in Tel Aviv, working with companies in fields as diverse as finance, music, fashion, and hi-tech.
LocalPublished: 26 December 2014
If your idea of a good time is staying up all night writing computer programs, you’re no doubt in the minority — and you’re also doubtlessly familiar with hackathons, which gather programmers together to do just that.
But if you’re a Shabbat-observing Jew who thinks a hackathon — with its race-the-clock challenge to create something high-tech and arguably functional — really would be fun, then you’ve probably already discovered the sad truth that most hackathons start when the weekend does, on Friday night. And while it may be fun, is anything less in the spirit of Shabbos than hacking down bugs in a computer program in the middle of the night?
Of course, real hackers — among computer cognoscenti, the term refers not to the malefactors who break into computer systems and disrupt lives, but to those able to put together quick if not always elegant solutions to difficult problems — see problems as challenges to solve. So it was only a matter of time before New York hosted its first shomer Shabbat hackathon.
Start with a three-year-old’s enchantment with a toy that moves by itself, as if by magic.
Add the love of a doting father.
Simmer with time. Throw in more than a dash of unexpected curves.
The result: The world’s largest O-scale model railroad layout.
On Sunday, you’re invited to the third floor of a former silk factory in Paterson to see it.
If you go, brace yourself. Prepare to be amazed. There are tracks and trains and buildings rendered in loving details. There’s a replica of an Esso oil refinery; a Manhattan subway station, replete with microscopic model rats, and there are yet more trains, including engines that puff rings of flavored smoke.
LocalPublished: 12 December 2014
Teaneck’s oldest synagogue and its youngest yeshiva high school are getting ready to tie the knot.
The precise terms of the relationship between the Jewish Center of Teaneck and Yeshiva Heichal HaTorah remain to be hammered out.
But by a close vote on Sunday night, the Jewish Center board agreed to explore a proposal from the yeshiva in which the boy’s high school, which now rents space in the synagogue, would share responsibility for the synagogue’s building, while the congregation would maintain its independence. Under the proposed terms, the school will pay only a fraction of the estimated 5 million value of the building, which includes a gym and a swimming pool.
The vote was 15 to 14, with the synagogue’s president, Isaac Student, casting the deciding vote.
Two Teaneck rabbis — Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster, director of programs for T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, and Rabbi Rebecca Sirbu, director of Rabbis Without Borders — took part in last week’s protest against police brutality in Manhattan.
Many Jews joined in the demonstration, at 96th Street and Broadway; it was organized at least in part by the Jewish community. Four rabbis —Sharon Kleinbaum, Jill Jacobs, Shai Held, and David Rosenn — were arrested there.
The protest last Thursday night followed a Staten Island grand jury’s decision the day before not to indict policeman Daniel Pantaleo, who choked Eric Garner to death in July, in what the New York City medical examiner found to be a homicide.
LocalPublished: 05 December 2014
If you were to make a film about Eran Riklis’s life — well, that’s ridiculous. You’re not the filmmaker; he is.
But if you were going to do it anyway, you might want to plan a shot of his passport. Or film him passing through customs. Because crossing borders is a recurring motif in this leading Israeli director’s life and filmography.
In his first big success, the 1991 film “Cup Final,” the border is with Lebanon. The film tells the story of an Israeli soldier held captive there, who bonds with his captors over the world soccer competition.
More recently, in 2004, “The Syrian Bride,” centers around a planned wedding in a Druze community in the Golan Heights that straddles the Israel-Syrian border. “The Human Resources Manager,” released in 2010, traces the story of a foreign worker killed in a Jerusalem terror bombing back to her Eastern European homeland. And his most recently released film, “Dancing Arabs,” is a fictionalized retelling of screenwriter Sayed Kashua’s experience as an Israeli Arab crossing the unwritten border into an Israeli boarding school.
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