RJ Blog

by Bobby Harris Last week I was in Israel attending the Jewish Agency for Israel’s Summer Staff Seminar where, together with many of the URJ Camp Directors, I met with and helped to prepare the Israeli staff who have been hired to come and work at our  URJ camps this summer.  During the seminar, we provide the Israeli staff the opportunity to participate in a camp like Shabbat service that might take place at one of our camps. I was asked to present a D’var Torah, and I chose to relate the Parsha to everything that we have done at [...]

by Rabbi Stephanie Kolin There’s a story told about East End Temple in New York City, the congregation in which I grew up. For 16 years, Rabbi Deborah Hirsch was my rabbi and rabbi to many families like mine. One day, a young boy I used to babysit, Matt, was walking with his mom; they were also members of East End Temple. They stopped for a moment on an NYC sidewalk to speak to a certain man. When the man walked away, she said to her son: “Matt, do you know who that was? That was the rabbi from Town [...]

As someone who grew up reading Little Golden Books in which mommies and daddies take care of their obedient children, I love how Maurice Sendak’s stories, by contrast, dive right into the fray of real life—warts and all.  As a librarian, I also appreciate what a pioneer Sendak was and how his stories and illustrations broke barriers in children’s literature.  I love the edgy realness of his characters—and especially relate to bratty Pierre of I-don’t-care fame who reminds me of my young self answering my own mother.  Sendak’s kids are not gift wrapped with pretty paper or shiny bows.  Like [...]

by Rabbi Bonnie Margulis Years ago, as an undergraduate at NYU, I was working on my senior honors thesis, “On the Ordination of Women as Rabbis.” It had been only 11 years since the first woman was ordained, but it was more than half a lifetime ago for me, and so seemed a very long time ago. It never occurred to me that I could try to go see Rabbi Sally Priesand and interview her. She was in Morristown, I was in Paramus – just an hour away, but who knew?  Today I kick myself that I was so dumb. [...]

by Rabbi Laura Geller Let me remind you what the Jewish world was like in 1976, the year I was ordained as the third woman rabbi in the Reform Movement, just four years after the ordination of Sally Priesand. I had been the only woman in my class; there were as yet no women professors teaching rabbinics. It was one year after the Reform Movement had published its new prayer book, Gates of Prayer. In the introduction to the prayer book was a radical statement: “we have been…keenly aware of the changing status of women in our society. Our commitment [...]

by Rabbi Denise L. Eger On this 40th anniversary of Rabbi Sally Priesand’s ordination, I am reflecting on the impact of that moment on our own Reform Judaism, the larger Jewish world and the implications on my own life. Rabbi Priesand is not just the first woman rabbi of contemporary times, but she is a rabbi’s rabbi. She has guided both the men and women of our Movement with her grace, wisdom, and inspiration. She has mentored both rabbis and lay leaders with her deep thoughtfulness, sense of humor and her deep humility. She has taught all of us what [...]

by Audrey Merwin In the movie White Christmas, Bing Crosby croons: When I’m worried and I can’t sleep I count my blessings instead of sheep And I fall asleep counting my blessings Crosby, playing the entertainer Bob Wallace, sings this lullaby to calm the fears of a worried youngster. His warm, soothing tones give substance to the words and create a setting of hope and comfort. What if anything does this have to do with the commandment to count the omer? Quite a lot, as it turns out.

I have just returned from eight days touring the sites of Judaism in Central Europe with six teenagers and one soon-to-be HUC student. When I first interviewed at my current congregation, I was asked, “Rabbi, what do you think about our Confirmation trip to Europe?” As I had looked at the synagogue website before the interview and noticed that it highlighted two things – the Confirmation trip and the Adult Education program – I knew that this was an important question. I started with, “I’m not sure why the trip doesn’t go to Israel…” When a murmur ran around the [...]

A couple of years ago, at the ripe old age of 96, Simon Wiesenthal died in his sleep. Wiesenthal survived nine different concentration and labor camps and faced certain death on two occasions, but somehow, he outlived his Nazi tormentors. Following the war, Wiesenthal appointed himself advocate of the tortured, the starved, the degraded and the slain. It is estimated that the Holocaust was perpetrated by at least 600,000 Germans and very willing collaborators from other nations – but to date, only 7,000 executioners have been tried. To measure Wiesenthal’s achievement, we need only recall that of the 7,000 prosecuted, [...]

by Erika Dreifus In 2006, Günter Grass’s confession that he’d been a member of the Waffen SS surprised me. But it didn’t depress me. It didn’t anger me. Grass seemed appropriately ashamed and regretful. I knew him to be an advocate for Germany’s recognition of its Nazi past. He wasn’t asking for my forgiveness, but he would have had it, anyway. I’d read the closing words of his 2002 novel, Crabwalk, as a regretful but accepting acknowledgment of the lasting reverberations of this past, for all of us. Those lines—“It doesn’t end. Never does it end.”—moved me so deeply that [...]