RJ Blog

The entire American Jewish world, it seems, is focused on how to engage or reengage the younger generations of Jews. Foundations are funding, denominations are discussing, and Federations and synagogues are searching for the latest and greatest strategies to engaging these lost generations. Our own Union for Reform Judaism kicked off its Campaign for Youth Engagement, on the theory that unless we engage young people in their early years, we surely will lose them in their later high school years and beyond. While the solution to this contemporary challenge necessarily needs to be multi-pronged and multi-focal, at Congregation Or Ami [...]

by Robin Messing Bogdanoff It started in August 2011 with, of all things, a shirt pocket. It was a very small pocket on a child’s striped tee shirt that caught my eye, because the shirt had been miraculously reinvented into a tote bag. What an inspired idea, to turn an iconic T-shirt into a bag! Strong and compact, yet expandable, colorful, playful, infinitely useful – and not difficult or expensive to make. For my $10 purchase, Massachusetts textile artist Crispina ffrench included instructions on how to make more bags and gave me permission to share the instructions with our synagogue community [...]

by Marilyn Price I’m not exactly sure when it first began. My guess is that I was 4 or younger, and my brother David was 6. We shared a bedroom, the only one, in an apartment with my folks on the north side of Chicago. They slept on the pull-out hideaway bed in the living room. No TV, no room to roam, just me and my big bro. We had books from the library, but I couldn’t read yet, so although David could have read me stories when we were supposed to be sleeping, he did not. We were compliant [...]

by Cantor Ellen Dreskin Not many of us stop to think about the role of storytelling in our lives. Everything that happens to us is sifted through our own filters, our own history, our own set of circumstances, and settles in our hearts and our brains as a story – our story. If Torah or liturgy or Jewish tales speak to us, it is probably because we feel the truth in these Jewish sources as it intersects with our own experience. How many of us remember our desire to hear the same bedtime stories again and again and again, and [...]

by Rabbi Andy Bachman “This series of pictures should strike a deep emotional response in the heart of every Jew.  No matter how far we have traveled from the observances that were practiced by our fathers, we have a feeling of reverence for the ceremonies themselves, and a respect for those who feel that these Jewish ceremonials constitute a necessary part of religion.” [From the English translation of Dr. Leopold Stein's Oppenheim Pictures, originally published in Frankfort, Germany in 1886] As Richard Cohen has pointed out, in Jewish Icons, Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, one of mid-nineteenth century German Jewry’s most famous [...]

Today is Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, when we pay tribute to all those who died in the Holocaust. Shoah, which means “catastrophe” or “utter destruction” in Hebrew, refers to the atrocities that were committed against the Jewish people during World War II. We’ve posted a number of moving and meaningful blog posts on RJ.org about this day, and we hope you’ll take the time to read them. We’ve also rounded up some of the interesting Yom HaShoah-related pieces that have been making their way around the Internet today. have we missed anything that you found to be particularly [...]

by Elaine M. Bergstrom Just as public schools advocate math and science over the arts, art is often pushed aside or offered only for the younger students in our Jewish supplementary schools. You may find craft-making to reinforce holiday celebrations or a story from the Torah. But art instructors who are privileged to teach art today want substantial lessons that endure and enhance their students’ well-roundedness and sense of the richness of Jewish heritage.

by Isaac Brynjegard-BialikOriginally posted on Nice Jewish Artist Every summer I spend two weeks at URJ Camp Newman leading classes in papercutting. The students are all campers in a program called Hagigah, which is focused on Jewish expression through the arts — fine art, dance, music, writing, photography, video, and more. They’re all high school students, many of whom have been coming to Camp Newman since they were little, and the summer is always a great experience. One of the groups I worked with choose papercutting as their “major” — two hours per day, six days a week, for two [...]

Modern Art is often hard to connect to inspiration. From the multimillion dollar canvases of a single color to more infamous works that cause somewhat regressive public figures to over-react, art can often be lost upon the consumer of the work. Yet in many cases art for the sake of making a person think–even if the person misses the point–is a good thing Jewish art is all too often stale beyond recognition. Stymied by cut glass or needle point ritual items these pieces which pass as art hardly make the consumer think nor do they push the envelope to the [...]