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News A Year After Saying They’d Ban Female Clergy, Why Aren’t Orthodox Doing It?
Eleven months ago, the leaders of an association of nearly 1,000 synagogues banned women from serving as clergy. Yet now, as the one-year anniversary of the ban is approaching, the organization is still dragging its feet on enforcing it. “I think that this has been delayed because it’s not a very popular decision,” said Sharon…
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Opinion Want To Help Women Rabbis Get The Respect They Deserve? Here’s A List
Recently, my colleague, Rabbi Jordie Gerson, wrote an op-ed regarding the most common type of erasure that female clergy encounter: the omission of title and withholding of respect. It is a large-scale battle, but one that is fought in small moments. The article sparked a wide-ranging discussion among my colleagues in the Reform rabbinate. Many…
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Opinion I Am The Rabbi, Not His Assistant. We Must Fight The Erasure Of Female Clergy
A few weeks ago I got home from the URJ Biennial – a convention of 6000 Reform Jews from all over the world who come together to sing, prayand learn for five days. Among the attendees there were dozens of women Rabbis, and many more female Jewish professionals. All attendees wore name tags which gave…
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Community I Rescued My Synagogue’s Torah Scrolls From Los Angeles Inferno
Shortly after 5:00 am on Wednesday, December 6th, my ringing phone startled me from my sleep. “Wake up,” a member of my congregation said, “The hills are all on fire.” I quickly turned on my television and saw flames engulfing the massive hillsides framing the Sepulveda Pass, the main thoroughfare through the northwest part of…
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Fast Forward Why This Christian Congressman Quoted A Famous Hasidic Rabbi
WASHINGTON (JTA) — “A Very Narrow Bridge” is a popular Hasidic song, one that is embraced by Jews of all denominations. The words to it, which are from the writings of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, the 18th-century founder of a Hasidic sect, are “The entire world is a very narrow bridge; the main thing is…
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Fast Forward Chabad Couple Does ‘Mitzvah Campaign’ Outside Home Of Subway Bomber
While law enforcement agents were searching the Brooklyn home of Akayed Ullah, the would-be suicide attacker who had detonated a pipe bomb in a Manhattan subway on Monday, a Chabad husband and wife took the unusual opportunity to launch a “mitzvah campaign” in the neighborhood. Rabbi Yisrolik Langsam, who heads a Chabad outpost in the…
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News Frustrated With Israel’s Leaders, Reform Jews Sharpen Focus On Its People
On Saturday, thousands of Reform Jews gathered in a cavernous Boston auditorium, filling the space nearly to capacity. Congregational leaders led the crowd in prayer to celebrate the Jewish Sabbath. The scene of the stage was projected on four massive screens, amplifying the intimate rituals of the sacred day to the scale of a football…
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Fast Forward Conservative Jewish Cemetery Opens Section for Interfaith Families
Interfaith families may now be buried together in a cemetery plot belonging to Congregation B’nai Israel, a Conservative synagogue in the coastal New Jersey town of Toms River. “There are always questions about burial of non-Jewish spouses in our cemetery,” Glenn Jacobs, a member of the synagogue’s cemetery committee told the website Patch.com, “and some…
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News Scoop: Heritage Foundation plans to ‘identify and target’ Wikipedia editors
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Fast Forward Their Pacific Palisades synagogue is standing, but all three rabbis lost their homes
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News ‘Do you have the Torahs?’ Synagogue races LA wildfire to rescue its past and future
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Culture In Peter Yarrow’s legacy, an uneasy blend of Jewish values and personal transgressions
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Fast Forward Jesse Cogan, ad exec who coined the slogan ‘Turn Friday Night into Shabbos,’ dies at 74
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Fast Forward Will a hostage deal happen this week?
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Fast Forward His home did not survive the Eaton Fire. But one precious family heirloom did.
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Fast Forward Who is Ari Berman, the rabbi who will deliver a benediction at Trump’s inauguration?
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