- Congregation Beth El–Keser Israel
85 Harrison Street, New Haven, CT 06515-1724 | P: 203.389.2108 | office@beki.org
85 Harrison Street, New Haven, CT 06515-1724 | P: 203.389.2108 | office@beki.org
…30s Havura, thanks to the initiative of Miriam Benson and the support of a number of program participants such as Eva Landau. It’s a nice way to bring people together and to help people locate their cohorts in the sea of members. The number of formal members does not tell the whole story. There are many families or individuals who identify BEKI as “their” synagogue, even though they are not formally members. For at least some purposes, we should t…
…ake sure he’s dead.” There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says: “OK, now what?” Even if you follow all the directions geschribben in the Shulhan Arukh strictly, letter by letter, you are not performing the mitzvot as our sages intended unless you understand what you are doing and why you are doing it. Our sages have taught that in order to perform a mitzva optimally, in most cases, one must do so conscientiously, th…
…nk, To the deaths of Miriam and Aaron. * * * One thing to notice About the number 14,700 Is that it promises reduction: It moves toward its own diminishment. There is a half-life logic to it, An inherent halving: 14 in the thousands category, Then 7, half-14, in the hundreds. In this promise of reduction, We move toward zero, Though we will never reach it. Just after the number of dead is given, Parshat Korach turns suddenly. G-d tells Moses to ta…
…did not experience antisemitism in India and, in fact, helped to rescue a number of Jews fleeing Europe in World War II. Conversation with Mark Oppenheimer, jewishledger.com, Nov 25, 2019 Mark Oppenheimer describes himself as a writer, talker, father, husband, dog-owner, and challah baker. Though not necessarily in order of importance. Challah baking aside, the talker in Oppenheimer will get to do just that on Sunday, Dec. 15, 10 a.m., at Congreg…
…Books of Moses verse by verse in 1994, and by 2007 had reached the end of Numbers, and concluded I Samuel at Passover 2015. Several other weekly and occasional study groups formed or were developed during these years. The Shabbat Shalom Learners’ Minyan (later renamed “Shabbat Shalom Torah Study”), initiated in the 1980s, continued to attract a diverse and loyal following. In 2000-2001 and 2001-2002 BEKI won Energy Star Awards and was designated…
…-August (2009) of the Swedish daily Aftonbladen, claiming that the Israeli Army has been capturing and killing Arabs in the West Bank and harvesting their organs, is widely repeated in the Arab press, without noting that the story is a hoax. At the end of 2007, HAMAS bombed the petrol facility in Israel that served Gaza and shot the people operating the border crossing, and then complained to the international press that Israel was withholding fue…
…or covering and seating? The committee will seek congregational input on a number of items, including the seating and potentially floor covering. The committee will make the final decision based on a variety of factors, including cost, durability, sustainability, and congregational input. Sound and Acoustics How will we handle room acoustics? We will work with the architect and potentially with an acoustical engineer. Is the space intimate enough…
…of all the people. Imagine if the parshah has told us, tribe by tribe, the number of people in each tribe, and separately, the number of males, 20 and up, who were fit for service. Would that kind of census send a different message to us, a message saying, “everyone counts”, including all the women? The second census, what I’ll call the redemption census, I find a strange one. It requires counting of all the male Levites who were at least a month…
…to the assassination of Mr. Rabin. Before Yigal Amir pulled the trigger, a number of Orthodox rabbis had stretched medieval Jewish law beyond all reasonable limits to classify Mr. Rabin as a “pursuer,” whose life could be taken in self-defense. The same body of medieval law explicitly sanctions the killing of Jewish heretics as the Union of Orthodox Rabbis surely knows. To publicly denounce Reform and Conservative Jew as apikorsim in the current h…
…r about the miracles in his life. He was a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army in WWI, when he was shot and seriously wounded. As the army lines were retreating, he was abandoned by his comrades, who left him chocolate to ease his death. Lying in a barn, bleeding from his serious wound, he was discovered by the farmer. The farmer saw the chocolate beside him and offered it to him, but Zadie refused it. He said, weakly, that what he needed was fre…
