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Liberal Rabbis Calling on Women To Take the Plunge for Ritual Purity
Top leaders of Conservative Judaism are promoting a plan to encourage female congregants to plunge regularly into a ritual bath, following the adoption last week of rabbinic guidelines by the movement’s central lawmaking body. At a September 13 meeting held in New York at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law…
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Paper on Labor Issues Falls Short in Conservative Vote
A rabbinic opinion calling on Jewish business owners to pay their workers a living wage and hire union employees was stymied by the Conservative movement’s top lawmaking body after the opinion received fewer than the minimum number of votes needed for a paper to be approved. At last week’s meeting of the Rabbinical Assembly’s 25-member…
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Ahmadinejad Draws Protests Throughout Trip to N.Y.
When he came to New York for his first United Nations General Assembly last year, the newly elected Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a virtual unknown. But in the past year he has become the international face of Tehran’s nuclear ambitions and growing influence from Lebanon to Iraq, not to mention his calls for the…
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U.S. Groups Mostly Mum on Pope’s Remarks
One of Israel’s chief rabbis was quick to condemn the recent comments of Pope Benedict XVI on Islam, but American Jewish organizations were mostly silent. The Israeli Sephardic chief rabbi, Shlomo Amar, sent a letter written September 17 letter to Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, a leading Sunni Muslim legal scholar in Qatar, in which he criticized…
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Concentration Camp Guard’s Secret Past Revealed
For decades, an elderly San Francisco woman kept her wartime stint as a Nazi concentration camp guard hidden from her family, including her late husband — a German Jew who’d fled the Holocaust himself. But time and the American government finally caught up with Elfriede Lina Rinkel, 84, who was deported to Germany this month…
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In Nashville, Hadassah Mulls Marriage Stance
With Tennessee voters set to decide in November whether to pass a constitutional ban on gay marriage, the issue is creating tension between religious and political values for many women in Nashville’s Jewish community. The struggle played out last week as about 75 individuals, from both Hadassah and the community at large, turned out for…
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Trustee Faints at Y.U. Ceremony
A member of Yeshiva University’s board of trustees fainted Monday at a groundbreaking ceremony for a building named in honor of her parents. The ceremony was held for The Jacob and Dreizel Glueck Center for Jewish Study, which will be Y.U.’s first new building at the school’s campus in Manhattan’s Washington Heights area since the…
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Food for Thought
Denial. Pleasure. Certainly neither is a foreign concept to Jews on Yom Kippur, when a seemingly interminable day of fasting segues into an orgy of kugel and smoked salmon. But would a simple piece of challah dipped in honey really taste so transcendental if we hadn’t spent all day mentally salivating for so much as…
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Youthful Interpretations
Yom Kippur Children’s Machzor Illustrated by Noam Zimmerman Gefen Publishing House, 64 pages, $15.95. Noam Zimmerman may be only 13, but she already has one up on most of us: a published book with her name on it. Her “Yom Kippur Children’s Machzor” is a one-of-a-kind prayer book made by a kid for kids. And…
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A Conversation With the Bad Boy Rabbi
Don’t tell Rabbi Niles Goldstein, the brash leader of New York’s New Shul and author of the new book “Gonzo Judaism: A Fresh Path for an Ancient Faith” (St. Martin’s Press), that the “High Holidays” are upon us. It’s not the holidays that Goldstein dislikes — it’s the phrase, which he calls “a metaphor for…
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For the Bee Man, a Sweet New Year
Dipping his apple in honey this Rosh Hashanah will have a special meaning for Southern California Iranian Jewish businessman Izak Kharrazi, who marks his 30th year in the unique and challenging bee-removal business. Affectionately known as the “bee man” by his client base, which includes such celebrities as Tom Hanks, Elizabeth Taylor and Charlize Theron,…
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