One year after Oct. 7, a Yom Kippur ritual of communal mourning takes on fresh meaning
Rabbis and liturgists are trying to find ways to honor personal loss and communal grief during Yizkor, the traditional memorial service
Yizkor
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Oct. 7: One Year Later -
Opinion Observing Yom Kippur on the street — and remembering those lost to violence
This week, Jews around the world will observe the second Yom Kippur of the Covid era. Despite the uncertainty of the never-ending pandemic, it remains a time for taking stock of the year that was and holding out hope for better times ahead. For far too many, 5781 was a year defined by too many…
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Life I Don’t Believe In Prayer — Yet I Say ‘Yizkor’ Every Year
Like many families, I go into the Jewish holiday season with some sense of sorrow and regret. There is nothing sad about these holidays themselves — even Yom Kippur, a day of fasting and forgiveness is pervaded with a sense of hopefulness and expectation that God will forgive us and inscribe us in the “book…
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News Remembering Fallen Jewish Soldiers as Memorial Day and Yizkor Coincide
Jews have a long history of U.S military service. Sephardic plantation-owner Francis Salvador became the first Jew to die in the American Revolutionary War when he fell fighting the Loyalists in South Carolina in 1776. Abraham Lincoln appointed Jacob Frankel as the first Jewish chaplain during the Civil War, to serve the growing number of…
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Life When Yom Kippur Prayers Don’t Help Grieving
Rosh Hashanah prayers, as depicted in the 18th century // Copyright Wikimedia Commons My father was buried on the eve of Rosh Hashanah 2002 and the holiday began just a few surreal hours after I stood at his open grave. The shiva — the seven-day period of formal mourning — was cancelled to usher in…
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Life Coming Out of the Orphan Closet
It’s the beginning of another Jewish year, holidays are bookending each week, and death is in the air. Two of the Yizkor prayers — the mourner’s prayer, which is recited on four different holidays throughout the year — are said this month alone. If that weren’t enough to put death on my mind, my father’s…
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Opinion A Blessing at the End
‘Doing Jewish” is a nice little catch phrase, but it doesn’t begin to cover the stunningly diverse ways in which America’s Jews in fact go about the doing of Jewish. The words call to people’s minds, say, the activities of the Anti-Defamation League or of their own local synagogue or Jewish community center, perhaps their…
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Life Mourning My Mother — on Yom Kippur and Throughout the Year
Sitting around the table — four young women, all of us had lost one of our parents — we told the stories that we always tell or never tell: when we knew it was inevitable (cancer was the cause of death in every situation), where we were when we had to drop everything and come…
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